I agree with you and don’t dispute banner clicks or site visit numbers to a sponsor’s website, I just question their relevance.
Also I do believe that the type of companies that are placing advertisements on web sites such as this or others know the quality ones and don’t rely on pure statistics.
I’m sure that many of the principals/managers that run shipyard or marine businesses, visit and or are members in YF, and as you mentioned are sophisticated enough to know that the traffic generated to their site from YF is based on quality not quantity.
When it comes to selling a $5M - $50M Yacht a good client filtering system is an asset.