Eh? The first site I googled,
http://www.xtremetop100.com/world-of-warcraft, does anyone play on the topservers? Well, on one or two, to the best of my knowledge. Is VanillaGaming the top Vanilla server?
Remember, I'm all for voting rewards and stuff, it's a decent way to attract new people, but it's not that great.
hard to say couldnt find their population rating but after some shifting through their fb page i found this comment from 2015
"A winner has been selected and will be contacted soon.
The answer is: 391,995 Characters has been created since 2009" to some contest they had, not sure what their number is now in almost 2018 tho but ether way, its hard to messure out active players from that number but it do give a general idea,
not to mention their ranked as Nr 12 on the list if you look further up some servers post their numbers and in the top ones its pretty high numbers,
so to your question if anyone play on the servers yes and its hell of alot more than one or two and if you go to other vote sites you will keep meeting high numbers on the top 5 - top10 servers even other games than wow to,
most games on those rate vote sites thats on the top got the numbers to back it to.
As for people talking about advertisement i would say youtube and voting sites is the only place its any point to do it, facebook is out of the picture no gamers search for private servers on fb they simply google it and pow first that pop up is vote sites only natural you click on them to,
then if they dont deside there then people go to youtube to check for videos about the server or reddit, but no matter how you twist and turn on it voting sites got massive amount of views and their the first thing that pop up when you search for private servers so saying its not great thats just being ignorant.
Kronos got a awezome server and the top voting sites would bring alot of good advertisement to it.