Good to hear some XIVPads Chatter.

My site can only reflect stats that has members. So more the merrier etc. There are a good amount of characters that likely dont exist, but out of the 8.8k that there is on atm, 7.5k i think have been updated since 1.18 so that gives us a nice perspective of activity.

But then if you compare my characters to say FFXIVPro, Pro has 380434, (shit jealous) characters added to it. (http://www.ffxivpro.com/achievements?st=380430), So that is another figure to goo off.

Another one is each character has an ID number, this used to be 7 digits long back around release but by around April characters started having 8 digits long. I dont know how these work because they are not incremental but something in the system has made all new characters have an id that is 8 digits, 7 digits would max out at 9,999,999 thats 10million characters. Which we all know there hasnt been and after trying to do a script to parse, after like 1000 numbers i'd say I got about 200 chars. So how it works, who knows. But now we have 99,999,999 as the max ID number.

One way I think is pretty accurate is:
Producer Letter "View" count
FFXIV Youtube video "View" count

If you balance out the 2 factors:
People who dont play watching the video / read the post
vs
People who play and didn't watch video / read post else where (unofficial site)

From this you can kind of "Grasp" the population.
The most recent is:
- 18,537 (English)
- 28,187 (JP)

I ignore GR/FR, you guys get like 10 hits lol.

There is also "visual" factors you can take into account
Uldah looks Busy!
Limsa/Grid is dead
Camps Taken!
No one doing anything else

In the end, if the game is doing well enough to recieve a full overhaul of an entire new game (v2) and is ran free for a whole year and now are planning subscription, I don't think SE is to worried, so neither should you =)

Hope it helps.