I went to the protest on Saturday at my state capitol. It felt like there were thousands of people there, but I really don’t know what I’m basing my estimate off of. How do news organizations make estimates on crowd sizes for events don’t have registration/ticket sales?
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They make an estimate and round up, bigger numbers = bigger ratings
when been packing people in small places for a min, think clown car…or germany around…. anyways, think about guessing the beans in a jar game. if we have a bunch of data on how many beans occupy a jar of x size, then it gets much easier to estimate. we have an idea of density of people, then we overlay that over the area of the protest.
with ai now being so good, we might straight up count most the people with a photo taken.
There is an older thread on this. The top comment is from someone who worked at a company that did it.
Not a news station, but I would suggest estimating crowd size by taking density times the area covered. For example, you can use Google Earth to find the area of a park or State House lawn, and then estimate 3 people per meter^2 for a tight crowd and multiply.
Depends on the scale of the event and how it was organised.
Things with controlled entrances, often event organisers will actually station volunteers or staff by the gates and have them count somehow how many people are entering and ideally exiting. That can be with a number of tools, everything from a tally clicker to automatic counters to the counters on mags (the “metal detectors” at big events with security). So for example, if you’re at a concert at TD Garden for example, everyone went through security – so those mags actually counted x number of people went through. Or for a protest at a city park, the organisers may have people stationed at every gate to the park with a counter and tally up. Also often the fire marshal will keep an independent count – they ultimately have the word on when a crowd exceeds a space’s limitations and thus, will be keeping as careful an eye as they can on how many people are in a given space. Sometimes when the news needs a count but isn’t given one, you’ll sometimes see them reverse it by reporting, for example, the concert reached capacity and was closed by the fire marshal. The official capacity of the venue is 12,500 people.
For huge events, there’s sometimes just ballpark maths. Basically, they look at say, a 10×10 square of the crowd, count how many people are in there, and then start multiplying that by how many squares of equal size they see of similar density. So for example, looking at how many people show up to a protest on the national mall, someone could calculate density and area roughly. A smaller protest say along a major street, someone could say well there was a non stop single file line all the way from 10th st to 17th st. That’s 700 meters with 3 people every meter, so roughly 2100 people.
They’re generally not perfect counts. Someone could count wrong. People could come in and out. But they usually give some sense of scale.