How big is the "niche" of Emacs users?

[Bastien <bzg@altern.org>]

Hi all,

I recently received an e-mail from a friend (no matter what was the
discussion about) saying that he wanted his views to reach a lot of
users, not only the "niche" of Emacs users.

Then I started to figure out how large is this "niche".

Of course, the word "niche" implies that we are able to define something
like the ecological "competitors" (what are the softwares around Emacs?)
which might not be trivial given Emacs is so versatile.

Anyway, I've found Xah Lee's list here:

  http://xahlee.org/emacs/text_editor_trends.html

But I don't know exactly how it was produced: how did he use Google
Trends to get it?  Other request: where could I possibly find absolute
numbers?  Is it possible to infer them somehow?  

Thanks for any hint,

-- 
Bastien