Ann: Freelancer 1Q19 Commentary, page-19

That little ticker really doesn't mean anything since its not actually a live total but rather grabs a number from the server and then auto increments it on a timer once loaded. You can see evidence of this if you load the page and then refresh the page once the number has increased a bit, you will note that the number will often go backwards.

Had a little look at the website code and they appear to be grabbing an initial value from the server and then increasing it in reference to another number retrieved. Good news is you don't need to view the whole page to get these numbers, you can use the URLs and get the raw numbers for yourself.

www.freelancer.com/ajax/_general_vars.php
Gives you the user, project and online user count.

www.freelancer.com/ajax/count-24h.php
Gives you the 24hr user and project count (I suspect this is what is used to determine the pace of the incrementing ticker)

Now we can't be sure that these numbers are 100% accurate either as the server could be just generating the general numbers based on a previous data point and the 24 hour numbers could be randomly generated although based on your description of seeing the ticker increasing at 1 per second I suspect that they are genuine.