From distrowatch http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."

except that it doesn't. it's a pissing contest based on clicking links.

I guess that makes Google Adwords totally irrelevant then.

I've clicked on Distrowatch's Mint entry several times to see what all the fuss is about.

I still run Ubuntu.