I've never even heard of ranker.com before. I must not be searching for terms they rank for.

Say what?

They use data from Freebase (the little brother of the Google Knowledge Graph) to help users populate the lists.

They get 8+ million page views on a good week.

Fortunately Google's Panda has dramatically slowed down the growth for sites like Ranker. Google applies an extremely heavy penalty for using content from sites like Freebase and Wikipedia. If those penalties didn't exist, there's little question Ranker would be a top 1k site.

Other lame content theft sites like Mahalo have been practically put out of their misery.

Ranker ~is~ a top 1k site.

Personally I've looked over the data for a number of successes and failures and I don't believe the conventional story about Panda.

Adding the data in this article to everything else I know about Ranker just confirms my model of what works and what doesn't.

No, they are not, at least not according to major reporters of such stats. What measure are you pointing to in order to indicate they are a top 1k site?

they ranked at #992 in Quantcast last week; they're got the Quantcast tracking code too, so the traffic numbers aren't crazy

I actually don't think they do; they're directly measured by quantcast. If you go to

http://www.quantcast.com/ranker.com

and select page views, week, and global they still peak at 4mm. Which is nothing to laugh at.