After reading some commentary on meta.stackoverflow.com about the famous users of Stack Overflow, and the 'star power' of the two founders, I decided to have a look at the one metric that can easily be interpreted as a measure of name recognition: Profile Views.  The first resulting graph is below and contains the Top 1000 users by reputation score.




While much of the graph meets my expectations (Jon Skeet has by far the most profile views, the top 10 users generally have larger bubbles), there are some interesting data points:

• Rich B, the most prolific down voter and a bit of a rabble rouser among SOpedians both on and off the site, has a huge bubble for someone not in the Top 10 or even Top 100 of users
• Two other Top 1000 users, but not Top 10 or 100, have relatively large Profile View bubbles: Darron and Ates Goral.  I am not familiar with them, although they are apparently popular by this measure.  

What was not  clear was what the characteristics of the Top 10/100/1000 users were, when ranked by Profile Views.  Do they just post volumes of answers and question?  Are profile views tied to reputation?  So I whipped up the below graph looking for answers. Results are limited to users with reputation of more than 100.




This graph turns out to be much more of a surprise. While some users' data points are very much predictably prominent (Atwood, Spolsky, Skeet, Gravell, de Lizard, and Rich B), others strike me as unusual:

• geocoin, Reputation Score: 425 (!)
• Oliver Green, Reputation Score: 1413
• AgentConundrum, Reputation Score: 1300

Why have these three users had so many profile views?  I've never heard of these folks and their reputations scores are relatively low. 

Beyond these three users, the correlation between both a) reputation and profile views, and b) posts and profiles views is weaker than I expected. Note the density of Top 100 user data points (red) with less than 500 posts and reputation scores well under 10,000. Interesting...