Well, the awards I give have to do only with the board statistics, not quality of content, mainly because the host owner is concerned with level of traffic via free hosted boards. This is also true of other free hosting companies as well. Freeforums.com, for example, will delete an entire board if it hasn't had anyone posting in it for a 3 month period. SMFNew doesn't do that, but it still does keep an interest in traffic statistics. The more traffic, the better, so the members here that do the most posting (or most new topics) get the award.
It's all about the raw numbers.