The best way to determine a site's popularity?

[ewomack]

So, how do people here determine the popularity of your sites?

I have used web counting tools in the past, but I find that different programs can give vastly different results. For example, StatCounter gives me far fewer hits than my ISP's counter. And some hits show up on StatCounter that don't show on my ISP, and vice versa.

Has anyone used this site before? Popuri.us. Credible? Not credible?

When I put in my url (the one in my signature, it spewed out the following:

Google PageRank: 4
Alexa Rank: 2,020,863
Compete Rank: 0
QuantCast Rank: 0
Google Backlinks: 78
Yahoo Backlinks: 2,249
Live Search Backlinks: 3
Technorati Links: 8
del.icio.us Bookmarks: 1
Bloglines subscribers: 0

I have to admit that I don't know what most of this even means, though some sounds encouraging.

Any other tools people use? Any good place to go to get explanations of all this? Thanks!

Update: Oops! I hope this is in the right forum... I assume some assiduous moderator will fix it soon if not.

[Bluecircle]

Contrary to popular belief, Alexa is pretty good for a very rough estimate. A site with an alexa rank in the millions doesn't get much traffic at all, in hundred thousands, it gets a small but decent amount of traffic, below 100,000 it gets quite a good amount of traffic, and below 50,000 it's pretty popular. I can't give actual number on how much traffic a site is getting for each ranking bracket, because it's varies quite a bit, but its good to quickly judge whether it's a site with a rank of 4,453,230 getting next to no traffic or v7n, which has a rank of 985 and get a lot of traffic.

[chicgeek]

Less marketplace, more marketing. I think.

[ideaGENERATOR]

I also like to use dnscoop.com