By the Numbers: Is New York Comic Con Really Bigger Than San Diego Comic-Con?

(Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for ReedPop) New York Comic Con celebrated its 20th anniversary in a big way this past weekend, welcoming a reported 250,000+ attendees to the Javits Center from October 8-11, 2026. That’s according to a press release from ReedPop, which also touted an estimated $91 million economic impact for New York City, more than 650 exhibitors, and over 500 Artist Alley participants. Those are impressive numbers for a convention that started with just 33,000 attendees in a single hall back in 2006. But there’s one number in particular that deserves a closer look: 250,000. After all, San Diego Comic-Con typically reports attendance of around 135,000 people. So does that mean New York Comic Con is now nearly twice the size of San Diego? Not exactly. In fact, we’ve been down this road before. Back in 2014, when NYCC announced attendance of 151,000, we took a closer look at how the two conventions count attendees. At the time, we spoke with Lance Fensterman, then Senior Global Vice President of ReedPop, who explained that NYCC’s attendance figures were based on tickets sold, rather than the number of individual people attending. And now, more than a decade...