That's just counting signups. Not necessarily who the active/popular users are. There's a lot of spam,junk and stolen work on deviantart, the site just makes ef

That's just counting signups. Not necessarily who the active/popular users are. There's a lot of spam,junk and stolen work on deviantart, the site just makes efforts to showcase the good stuff. If you weighted it based on artist popularity you might get a different picture.