How many of those are voluntary, active users, though?

I see them more as "victims" of it, who are subjected to it without giving much consent at all. Somebody loads a blog article or some other web page that uses Disqus for accepting and showing comments, and without necessarily wanting to use it the page's visitors have become "users" of Disqus.

sheesh. That's a bit much.

The site owner chooses a commenting system. People who want to comment, comment using it. Victims?!

Victims is a pretty loaded term, but it's not an unreasonable accusation. The number of unique monthly users of disqus shouldn't be based on those who unwittingly use it.

Reading your comment again, I wonder what the true definition is. Is the number based on page views? Or is it the number of people who actively interact with the widget (say, posting a comment) after it has loaded? Sounds like you're assuming the later metric while the 'victims' comment is assuming the former.

Edit: thinking about it, 1 billion unique people, that sounds like the victim class to me.

yep, speak my peace or not, have no voice or use their crap system. victim is about right imho.

It's similar (though a bit stretched) to count site visitors as google analytics users. Or, less stretched, users who click on ads as a Google Adsense/words users. It doesn't subtract from their success though.

i cant stand disqus, i leave articles more than not because i dont like to be forced to comment using the system. it blows and needs to die... i thing webmasters use it because they are lazy, not because it is good.

I don't know if you've used a lot of blogs/CMSes/etc, but you definitely overrate their commenting systems. Most of them are crap. That's why Disqus is so popular, because it has tons of cool features (like the little popup that says when someone has posted before you).

Heck, Disqus is better than 90% of the forums out there (Hi, there, PHPBB or vBulletin!).