How Big is Occupy Wall Street?

It’s a simple question.  How big is Occupy Wall Street (OWS)?  If you talk to the members, you’d think it’s the biggest movement ever and that it’s growing exponentially.  Even non-supporters think it’s a big movement with explosive growth.  OWS claims they’re the 99% fighting against the 1%, so let’s look at how big the movement really is. 

Let me preface this by saying that I’m doing this based on second-hand sources and what I see in the media and online and what people I know are saying.  I’m not actually at one of these demonstrations.  I’m currently laid up with a broken foot for at least a couple more weeks and regardless of one’s opinion of the protests, attending in an injured state is quite unwise.  I went to Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear last year and I would still have attended that in my present state because the potential danger was far lower.  It’s all about risk assessment. 

This is also a back of the envelope type of exercise.  If I was blogging at the time it started, I would’ve tried to do this for the Tea Party (TP), but at this stage of their movement’s development, it’s probably not a worthwhile exercise.  Also, the big problem with trying to do a similar analysis today for the TP is they have so many big, but separate groups (Tea Party Patriots, Tea Party Express, etc.) and there is likely a great amount of overlap between them.  There’s no way for me to even begin to guess how much overlap there is between them.

All that said, let’s get going.

One of the moderators of OccupyWallSt.org posted that, this past Thursday, 6 October, their website got 410,000 hits.  They were unique hits.  I’d also be curious to see a breakdown of hits within the USA versus the rest of the world, but I doubt they have that information because it’s a pain in the butt to track.  We know they were 410k unique hits, but let’s assume that all 410k hits were from within the USA and all of them will be eligible to vote in 2012. 

USelectionatlas.org shows there were approximately 130 million votes cast in the 2008 presidential election.  I’m going back of the envelope here, so I’ll use this number to keep it simple and avoid having to get into modeling stuff like population growth and voter percentages.  It’s good enough for my purposes.

410,000 / 130,000,000 = 0.00315 or 0.315%.  If you tally by website hits from their central website, OWS accounts for just under 1/3 of one percent of the voting population.  That’s just the people who voted in 2008.  The US census for 2010 on 2010.census.gov says the population in 2010 was about 309 million (http://2010.census.gov/news/releases/operations/cb10-cn93.html). 

410,000 / 309,000,000 = 0.00132 or 0.132%.  Yes, based on this measure and my assumptions, OWS makes up less than 1/7 of a percent of the population of the USA. 

The natural counter is, “Well, Tim, that’s all well and good, but most of the action is taking place in the real world, not the virtual world.”  That’s a very valid point, and I’ve looked at that, as well.

Meetup.com has a section for Occupy Together (meetup.com/occupytogether) and they schedule gatherings and such through it.  As of this writing, it has 928 communities.  Denver is largest at 115 occupiers and that’s the only one above 100.  Even if we assume they have 100 members each, again an assumption heavily skewed in OWS’s favor, that’s only 92,800 people.

Clearly, the demonstrations in Denver aren’t the biggest.  New York City is way bigger than 115 people, probably by at least a factor of 100, but likely more (obviously if 700 people were arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge).  Even when we consider the likely development that many protesters have left NYC and started gatherings closer to home, we still need to add some pad to the numbers.  Padding the 92,800 by a factor of five to account for a few big city demonstrations skewing the average higher takes us up to 464,000 people, which is a bit higher than what we had above.  This approach makes sense because it factors out people from other countries.

In yet a third approach, let’s look to Twitter.  @OccupyWallSt has about 57,000 followers and @OccupyWallStNYC on Twitter has about 43,000 followers.  These are the two largest ones I’ve seen, and they likely have tremendous overlap and a significant number of people from outside the USA.  Interestingly enough, this outweighs the TP’s presence on Twitter, as the groups I named above only have around 10,000 followers each.

By comparison, @BarackObama has about 10.5 million followers, which is still pretty small against the 130 million total votes in 2008.  This probably makes a statement both about Barack Obama’s popularity and Twitter’s market penetration.

Fourth, we’ll even look at Facebook.  OccupyWallSt.’s Facebook page has about 47,000 likes.  That has the same problems as Twitter data, but it’s also consistent.  I think the Facebook data is even more significant because Facebook clearly has a much larger user base.  For perspective, TP Patriots has about 850,000 likes on their page, but that’s a tough comparison to make because the TP is a few years old while OWS is a few weeks old.  I'm not trying to compare the two movements here so much as assess the size of OWS.

Again, no matter how you slice it, OWS is a very small, but very vocal minority. 

Here’s the bottom line.  We’re talking about impressive numbers on their own because hundreds of thousands of people are a lot of people.  However, when we look at the percentages, these numbers are miniscule.  This isn’t to say that growth won’t make the movement bigger.  All I’m saying now is they shouldn’t overestimate their current size and neither should you.  They claim to be the 99%, but my calculations show they aren’t even the 1%.