As a company that deals with data analysis, Kaggle can surely tell between different levels of user participation.

I interpret it charitably as "some fraction of users forced to register in order to download data go on to become active users of the platform".

I’m sure they can. But they can also choose not to distinguish a high quality user from a low quality one when promoting their site.

For example, this post - http://blog.kaggle.com/2017/06/06/weve-passed-1-million-memb... - talks about a million users. But does not say how many are low quality, inactive ones. Or even describe how they filtered out low quality users from their analysis.

Welcome to marketing?

> As a company that deals with data analysis, Kaggle can surely tell between different levels of user participation.

Kaggle outsources data analysis to bright students willing to work for a tiny fraction of their actual worth. Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent.

> Their business model has nothing to do with their own analytics talent

I recall — some years ago — when they were advertising for Jobs, some of the criteria for potential technical fitness was a high placement in some of the competitions. Plus, I have engaged in a few of the competitions and you have to have a team of capable data scientists to design them. They are not clueless people.