we just changed the way we count ACTIVE members. the real count of members is on this page (people who have created an account): http://www.chess.com/members/member_countries.html
234,000 registered accounts. only 44,000 of them are somewhat "actively" playing Online Turn-based Chess. many of them are simply here for live chess, tactics trainer, chess mentor, or to read Rael's forum posts. :)
If I'm not mistaken there are now 43,895 members on chess.com before there was only 15000, what happened?