As part of our paper on the New York City tech/information sector, we analyzed help-wanted ads in order to  a preliminary estimate of the size of the “Big Data” Economy in New York and the whole country. Our preliminary estimate is that today, the Big Data Economy includes roughly 450,000 workers nationally. That includes tech workers with Big Data skills; supporting personnel in the same companies (marketing, accounting, HR, legal, and so forth); and a conservative estimate of spillover jobs produced in the rest of the economy.*

Judging by these preliminary estimates, the Big Data Economy is one-third smaller than the App Economy. Still, 450K jobs is quite significant . We will be sharpening up this estimate in the future, and perhaps doing a geographical analysis as well.

*One little quirk here. This estimate includes spillover jobs, so as to be consistent with our published App Economy numbers. By contrast, the estimate published in table 10 of the New York City tech/information paper did not include spillover jobs, to be consistent with the industry-based numbers in that paper.