How does SpotPlex differentiate between content which is "good" and content which is "popular". Everyone goes to a page, but it's total crap. BAM! Spotplex's front-page has content which is getting tons of hits cause "Hey, it's on the front page, It MUST be good!", but is in fact complete shit.
or do they have a method for that?
How it works is simple they pull your content from your RSS feed, when you've got new content it will find that article and include it in their system, from there a 24 hour clock begins.
In that 24 hour time frame your unique article views is what increases your spotplex rank, so if you get 5000 unique views to one article your almost garenteed to make it on the main page, it doesn't matter if the topic is complete shit, it only matters if you get those views.
I'm not 100% sure if the popular topics get held on the page for another 24 or 48 hours but at the end of the first 24 hours every article not on the popular page gets reset, so the articles that had 200 views will now have zero views and it begins the count all over from the start.
When comparing an entire site it simply adds up all of your unique article views and gives you a rank depending on how many views you've got, so if I got 10 views and someone else got 20 views then the guy with 20 views will be ranked higher then me (That only deals with the full site not the seperate articles).
Simply put the spotplex system favors to high traffic sites, when I first joined I could make it to a main page with less then 100 unique views, now you need 500 or more to get their and its inceasing fast, eventually I feel that only the few top blogs will be always on the popular pages, bringing in even more free traffic for them.
