Wired Magazine just came in the mail the other day. I don’t think I’ve ever read it before–my husband Ed subscribes to it. But an article caught my eye, “Meganiche” by Clay Shirky.
Shirky defintes a meganiche as “a thin slice of the Web that nonetheless reprensents roughly a million users”, or one tenth of one percent of today’s web audience. He further states that a tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. One tenth of one percent of today’s web audience is a million people. That’s nothing to sneeze at.
So, it got me wondering….will “virtual assistance” one day be a meganiche? Unfortunately, there’s no way to know exactly how many virtual assistants exist in the world today. Part of the problem is what your definition of a virtual assistant is. If you mean solely someone who provides administrative assistance virtually, your numbers will be much lower than if you include everyone who provides services virtually, from graphic designers to writers to legal assistants to web designers. I know that VANF has around 3,000 members. Other VA groups may have close to that many people and some will overlap and some won’t.
So how many virtual assistants will have to have how many clients each to turn our profession into a meganiche? Anyone care to do the math?