From looking at the pictures of both rallies, and knowing D.C. myself, I can estimate this:
Beck's rally: 140,000 people
Stewart's rally: (200,000) people. Correction Nov.1st: 156,000
Looking at the density we can roughly say that there are 4,000 people for acre. (I'm using American measures here). Even though in the front acres could be up to 7,000, but on average 3,000 it's fine. (Btw in the European demonstrations people are more packed). So:
Glenn Beck's Rally: Restoring Honor in America
Photo source: GlennBeck.com
Therefore being generous:
15 acres
There is a pool in the middle, so:
20 acres.
TOTAL 35 ACRES X 4000 = 140,000 people
Which is a lot of people, but it's not the more than 1,000,000 people, some are saying. I even heard 1,5 million.
Rally for Sanity and/or Fear. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
There is still no aerial pictures online (as soon as there is) but according to TV images, it was from 4th street (podium) to Washington Monument. Also with the generous 4,000 people per acre.
Therefore my initial calculation was this:
I wrote this: "If some use the same propaganda did for Beck's one, then you can say 2 million. But actually 200K it's a LOT of people. Coincidently, this is the same number of people who RSVP on facebook, and media has been estimating. But people are saying online they were like sardines, and that they past the Washington Monument.
p.s. I assure you that I came up with the 200,000 without thinking about the facebook number.
Look at the picture FoxNews used :) They changed it, but it was a funny one from the very first lines, showing a few thousand only)."
Nov. 1st 2010 update:
Above was my initial estimate from blogs, twitter updates and TV online. But with today aerial pictures from CBS
Therefore it's not 50 acres, as I said on Saturday ("I'm going to say 50, cause it seems it gets until Wash. Monument on TV but you can't tell") but 39.
Here is the new area:
50 acres x 4,000 people = 200,000.
correction Nov. 1st. 39 x 4000 = 156,000
Still the Raly of J. Stewart and S. Colbert had 20% more attendees than Beck's. This is a great proof that most of the Americans, can be highly patriotic, and and the same time fed up with the extreme right discourse.
Thanks to
http://manifestometro.blogspot.com/
maps.google.com/
http://www.acme.com/planimeter/
and all corporate media (which is as liberal as the business who own them).
