I just added this to the observatory:
There are 47 Million Developers in the World
Thereās plenty of fascinating data and I was curious about their methodology.
Got me thinking, how many testers do you believe there are in the world? And why donāt they all have an MoT professional membership? 
How would you work out that number? What would be your methodology?
Itās a fascinating conundrum.
I suppose people always say a good ratio is 1 tester : 3-4 developers.
So in total there are 13.5 Million Testers? 
That is a very good question! Iām not sure how to answer it
More Marketing required? XD
Actually @simon_tomes how many testers DO have a MoT Pro Membership?
We can see many Discord and Reddit communities for testers, and the number of users is much higher than MoT, and obviously, one reason is the price. Whenever a price is added to something, people think twice before joining.
Another reason I think is the lack of enthusiasm in peoples to join communities. People still donāt acknowledge the role of communities in their careers, and maybe because of that, they are unaware of it. Even I was unaware till early last year 
Another reason is that most probably, the contribution, people have a fear of contribution. The fear of being judged for the content they share or contribution made, and that fear stops them from becoming a member of such a community.
And lastly, work pressure, people are surrounded by so much work pressure and even on weekend,s and then on top of that AI has emerged that mostly people are either looking for a job or planning to switch jobs and hence they want to focus on the interview rather than becoming part of such a community.
Totally! Not every employer is willing to pay for the subscriptions, even lets say you have 25 employees, that would be x25 the cost.
I usually pay these things from my own pay as a regular employee (I totally donāt mind). But sometimes the price is to deep for regular person and not a company.
And as a person I compare the price to other platforms and if I get more then for less money why wouldnāt I do that instead of this? Or maybe itās vice versa, other platforms might be to expansive and people will get MoT Subs.
Same for certifications
Itās not information we share publicly.
One way to look at it is whether itās a good thing that we exist in this world and to support what makes the world better.
Youāve clearly gotten a lot of value over the years. Getting verified helps us to help you in many ways that arenāt measurable.
For sure! For me MoT is the largest online QA Community there is, and I will always recommend it to people! 
We also have to accept that with the rise of AI, people will show less interest in communities, and the reason is that it takes patience to be active on communities, for say we face any issue we post the question then it is not necessary that we will get respond then only, it might take 1-2 days also for someone to respond to our query,
But with AI, we can get an answer in just a single prompt. Obviously, the answer will lack a human touch, but still, people can compromise on quality if it saves time.
And secondly majority of the resources are available on YouTube, and that is also a reason people donāt have less interest nowadays in such communities.
somewhere people are becoming impatient and the community needs patienceā¦
Even I will happily recommend people to join this community. 
I agree! We see it on meetups also, Communities are less about finding the right answer but more about innovation. Whatās the new stuff that I donāt know yet?
āWhat are the cool kids doing these days?ā
If we host a meetup with an Open Space format and we create a session about hacking or chaos engineering, something spicy that almost nobody knows anything about. Youāll get a full room.
I recently did a talk about OSINT in Pentesting & Crime investigation, They had to move me to a new room 3x (literally) because it was fully booked before any of the other rooms were fully booked. Most people have passed the ājunior-suiteā and are looking for more.
testers or software testers?
Because if you notice, everyone profession involves testing to some degree.
Even a child will test and find out that they can unlock the baby proof cabinet lock in a certain way 
I know recently there was a āState of Devā survey that went out and I started to fill it out but then I didnāt know if I should because my title is not āDeveloperā.
Iām wondering if there is any type of āState of Testingā surveys out there? Actually, looks like Practitest posts one yearly.
Ah! Hereās 2025! I literally changed the year in the URL to see what would happen. Please enjoy the stats!
oooh, yeah. Love this.
From a tech perspective, if there are 47 million developers, then there are 47 million people that need to know about testing.
Our reach just expanded exponentially!
Even if the number of software engineers is in fact overstated, that is still a lot of testers, even if you did use a 1:5 or 1:6 ratio. Because on one end, you will have 1:8 as a ratio, and on the other had, it will be better, and that still gives me at least 5 million testers, consider that around 1/4 of them do speak English normally, yeah, a lot of missing people.
My guess is people are busy in their day jobs, or/and do not get much from communities. Iām primarily an embedded software tester, and that means very little interaction of value to me because Iām in the minority. But I still learn loads from the community chaps about heuristics and and I get challenged to grow. You cannot really put a price on injecting life into your career.