There are many altcoins out there however not everyone of them have good stats right now. Altcoin with good and active dev team with enough fund to promote their services overseas get good attention worldwide while other fails.
But security in network is also very critical for popularity and trust. Just read about recent DAO hack and how that have effected ETH market.
Yea, I read about the DAO hack.
It really wasn't a hack, the contract simply wasn't waterproof.
But thats often a problem with new languages like Solidity.