Decades of research has shown that you can get a pretty accurate picture of the US population from a sample of under 3000 people, if you choose them carefully. If you really, really want to drop your margin of error as low as possible, you look at about 9000. After that, there’s just not a lot of gains to be had. U.S. pollsters looked at the intentions of hundreds of thousands of Americans and still called the 2016 election wrong. Politicians’ careers depend on accuracy. Creative people’s careers depend on insights, and that’s where small data rules.
Source: Big Data Is A Sham
True enough. But big data companies are not trying to predict population trends. They want to microtarget individuals.