It refers to the maximum number of people that a topic is relevant to. It tells us what portion of the population understands the meanings associated with a topic or trend. This includes those who create and drive the conversation, those who follow and engage more passively, and those who are sucked in by similar conversations, and those who have absorbed the ideas passively due to a high level of cultural penetration.
In other words, it's the maximum size of the culture you're studying.
Our Predictive Anthropology Platform offers two population sizes:
current: within the time period of the search
predicted: after 1-5+ years, depending on the search terms