Millions of spectators? Urban Legend?

Yes, these type of figures get repeated with nobody questioning them. It's like when they say that 5 billion people watched the Olympics or the World Cup soccer final. Nonsense.

Yeah, the big error in your argument is that you are working off the assumption that they are all spectating the whole time. It's a 6 hour event. If you assume every spectator watches for ~30 minutes, then you are down to needing about 1 person per yard by your calculation... and honestly, most of those spectators are just chilling and waiting a few minutes for the person/people they are cheering for or just watching for a few minutes while they walk to get their morning coffee. Also, there is no requirement that spectators be at street level or even outside. There are a lot of people with apartments along the route who will host people or maybe just watch on and off throughout the day.

So, while I can't be sure either way, I'm inclined to trust the data scientists who do polling and crowd estimating to come up with their numbers vs your back of the napkin calculations. At the very least, it seems unlikely that 98.5+% of the people in NY are able to avoid spectating an event that is blocking off over 26 miles of their streets so your 100k number seem comically low... maybe 100k people on average over the 6 hour duration.

Same as Macy's Thanksgiving Parade estimates. The numbers are wildly exaggerated.

I wonder if they are closer to reality if you count everyone who glances out of their apartment or living room window and catches a minute or two of the race

Certainly there are way less people spectating early when the pros are out leading on the course, which is what we see on TV. Seems like spectators come out later now than in years going way back.

I think the total number could be close to the estimates considering all the people who come and go throughout the entire day.

The media, corporations, running expos, coaches, churches, pretty much everyone - they all lie their faces off. This is mostly done by habit, but they will go above and beyond whenever a profit motive is involved. Gee, I wonder why there are a lot of people that don’t trust what they’re told these days.

I think your points are right, except do any actual data scientists attempt to count this thing accurately? Crowd sizes do get exaggerated by the media all the time.

I can't speak for the New York Marathon marathon, but I know others use companies like Nielsen for crowd estimates, and it is pretty serious business because advertisers are paying for a certain amount of views and if companies overcount, they could piss off billion dollar business giving them millions in revenue.

Estimates for things like marches or rallies may or may not have great estimates as they don't really care and it's probably just one guy looking at pictures and sampling/estimating, with nothing really at stake except the groups bragging rights.

I was there....I counted at least 1,093,378..

You must have missed a few because I counted 1,094,213

Only 4,000 watched the Super Bowl live last year, the rest were looking at their phones.

Most people are spectating the whole time.

Or much of it.

Your 30 minute assumption is absurd. It's not like different waves of specators are coming in every 30 minutes

The OP is right. No way 1 million spectators

I can easily fit over 100 people for a party in my yard.

There are 8.1 million people in New York City. 7.5 million if you don't include Staten Island where resident's cannot easily view the race. The race snakes along 26.2 miles of streets. 4 - 4.5 miles of the race cannot be viewed by spectators since people are running on closed bridges. So, that's 22 miles of potential viewing.

As someone pointed out, approximately 45k different people per mile. That's like the size of Citi Field which is impossible. I ran the course and during some parts people were 5 rows deep. I would say the average was 2 rows deep though. And some parts like going through Lower Williamsburg had no one.

There's a website where you can easily visualize crowd sizes. My guess is 20k around Barclay's center, 20k on First Avenue, 3k in the Bronx, 10k in Long Island City, 20k stretched from Bay Ridge to Barclays. If i had to guess probably 100k-200k people watched the race in person. 500k at max. No way close to a million.

I have no idea if the true number is close to a million, but you're ignoring the number of people who have a view of the race from their home or workplace or from some mode of transportation.

Not for NYC. But that's also over the course of an entire day.

And considering that at least three miles of the race do not allow spectators at all (no spectators allowed on bridges) that reduces the possibility even more. They used to say 2 million spectators, with a million on First Avenue alone, which only has a dense number for about three miles from 16-19 then really thins out. Have they been lying to us all this time? Bastardos!!!!

Exactly. 26 miles of NYC with an event taking nearly an entire weekend day. Easily one million in the city have eyes on the course at some point.