I got this message pop up while on DT contributor page. Is this legit? Because most of these places are more or less small villages.

I got the popup today and also email from DT yesterday with an even longer list of places "Buyers are looking for these places in your country right now:"

It seemed so amazingly idiotic and slightly funny that I didn't delete the email - there were probably 500 place names in a four column list!

I'm in the US, but they included small towns - Zephyr Cove, population 565 - and big cities - Tacoma, population 210,000. They also included places that aren't towns or cities, like Yellowstone National Park. There were lots of places I've never heard of - for example Tok (it's in Alaska) and Egg Harbor (one in Wisconsin and one in New Jersey, they don't specify which )

I find it literally incredible that buyers were searching for all these places. So what is DT trying to do?

I got this too, every Austrian Village Bushes and Creeks, but no big Cities

Got the same, seems like a computer generated list of every local district and town in the country.

I got one. I can only assume it was generated by looking at what people are searching for combined with stuff they don't have. So, London isn't in the list even though thousands of people will have searched for that... but it's been left out as they already have 210,165 images with that keyword. Whereas Camborne is in the list, as probably a few people searched for it, but there's only 44 images on the site.

Got one too and after examining the cities listed I can just say that they are making fun of us and assuming we are stupid because they did the same thing that porn sites use to generate those fake popup chats claiming there's a really hot girl in badly located ISP territory that wants me to come over...
I guarantee that no one ever searched for the towns and cities they listed for me in that email.

I can only assume it was generated by looking at what people are searching for combined with stuff they don't have.

That would be my guess - in the past they have sent out e-mails about searches that didn't return anything (or was that Alamy?  I can't remember).  I suspect these are searches that either turned up nothing or where nothing was purchased.  The drawback is that the person who searched for that yesterday might no longer need an image of that place or could have found what they needed elsewhere.  Or it could have been a photographer trying to find a place with no or few images.  Might be worth uploading a few if you already have them on your computer or can get to a place easily, but not worth expending too much effort for the possibility of  a couple of 35-cent sales.

If they were really interested they could do a spreadsheet showing search terms, no sales, no images. That would be really useful. But I don't think any site provides anything but the most basic metrics.

It looked to me like they are using gps data from back in the old days when I used to bother putting a photo location on their map.. those old places are all in the custom list that I get.  I didn't even buy a gps for last camera, at one time it seemed important but now I really don't care....