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> where the 500,000th most popular site is very likely to be a site that got some traffic a long time ago, but now isn't even up.

That's literally the phenomenon the article is describing.

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Ok let me reword it differently: the 500,000th most popular site on these lists most likely isnt the 500,000th most visited and it might not even be in the top 5 million. These data sources are so bad at capturing popularity after 50k sites or so simply because they dont have enough data

I haven't tested this, but the "Cisco Umbrella 1 Million" is generated daily from DNS request made to the Cisco Umbrella DNS service. That seems to be a very good and recent dataset.

It does count more than just visiting websites though. If all Windows computers query the IP of microsoft.com once a day that'll move them up quite a bit. And things in their top 10 like googleapis.com and doubleclick.net are obviously not visited directly.

So while it is quite a reliable and recent dataset, it is not a good test of popularity.

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