Help with data collection PleaseFollow

Hello! I am a student and for a math project I have to do a data collection of server population sizes. My topic is to study how the xpacks affected general population sizes of wow (all servers) in the us and in europe. This trend can establish whether or not the xpacks were effective in increasing the popularity of the game.

In order to do this, I need data on estimated or recorded total population sizes of US and Europe realms: in the second month after release, in the middle of the duration between xpacks, and in the last second month before the release of the next xpack. I need this data for all xpacks and including vanilla wow, except for MoP. I have tried to check on the internet but such data proved hard to find. Thus I refered to this forum as this is the site where I found the recent censuses, in the hope that people can at least kindly refer me to the right sites or contacts where i can acquire such data. Any help whatsoever will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much for your time!

I'm going to go out on a limb and presume Blizzard would be the only ones with actual real numbers. There is a site, warcraftrealms maybe?, that (at least used to) keep up on general progress, horde/ally ratios, and general population size of servers but a) I haven't been there in ages and b) I can't speak to the accuracy of their numbers.

Also factor in that there are a lot of people with multiple accounts, people who share accounts (against ToS but happens I'm sure), and people like me who have 50 characters on 13 different realms but really only play a couple of them on 1 realm 95% of the time.

I think finding any hard data is going to be near impossible unless Blizzard is very cooperative. For what it's worth, most people I've talked to or read from both in game and out seem pretty happy with the expansion as a whole and I've seen a lot of "I haven't played in 1-2 years but I'm back!" both in forums and in my guilds. Anecdotal remarks are worthless for a math project but that's all I've got.

Possibly contact Blizzard and ask for this information? I am not sure how effective that would be but it would certainly be your best bet to get the most accurate information.