Part of this will be how you define a nomad. There are people from the US who spend almost all year now in Chiang Mai, year after year. Are they nomads? At which point are they more of an ex-pat? Is someone who lives in one US state and travels to many others frequently considered a digital nomad to you?

Chiang Mai is a bit of a digital nomad capital as it is relatively friendly and reasonably cheap to live in, and there are many other online workers of various times and varying levels of success around. As I typed this on 2/11/19, the Chiang Mai digital nomads Facebook group has 32,500 people. The kohubbers (popular coworking spot kohub.org) has less than 1200. dojo community (dojobali.org) has 2700.

These hardly represent all digital nomads globally. However, if you are using the definition of someone nomading internationally and maybe hops around a bit, they are at least a bit insightful. TThe first number is really from a city that is the ‘digital nomad capital’ - you are unlikely to find more nomads anywhere else in the world. 35k Facebook members certainly does not mean 35k people there either - plenty have gone or would like to go there. Same with Kohub or dojo Bali, popular coworking spots. KoHub probably has 60–80 members on site at any given time. Dojo Bali, I’ll guess, is 80+, although that will undercount the amount in Bali right now, even in their region of Canggu.

I spent the last three winters in the Philippines, Thailand, Bali, UAE, and Turkey, mainly in SE Asia. Only in the last 2 of those winters did I use coworking spots. I was surprised at how many familiar faces I saw, whether in Thailand at the same place (ko hub) or across places (people I met at Kohub, I later met at dojo Bali). Overall, I don’t think the number is enormous. However, I expect it to increase with the rise of more work-from-home or wherever positions are available, particularly as larger companies open up to this for just regular employees. Many of the nomads doing this are entrepreneurs of some form (which includes having success or not) - which is a small subset of people as well.