I tracked down the culprit. Looks like Nathan Stewart made the statement in an interview to the Seattle times.
According to this D&D has officially surpassed MtG in NA I guess, and that means about 4% of all NA are playing D&D (325 Million US citizens + 36.3 million Canadians, unless someone thinks it is massively popular in Mexico and Central America). This means on AVERAGE for a town of 2000 you have 80 - 100 players. Interesting claim.
I would imagine this is what people are taking as an official statement. I don't see this as being that prevalent (but then, Maybe it's all in the Northwest and they all live in Washington, Oregon and California and the rest of the US is desolate...would make sense seeing the lack of materials and other things available on the East coast).
Interesting Mearls is letting Stewart take the fall on this if it causes a ripple. It's not from Mearls himself I notice. At least I think I found the source everyone is referring to.
I found THIS hilarious...give a statement but refuse specific numbers...which fits for Nathan's position
It’s a special time, and I have a big belief that people are really craving face-to-face connections,” he said. “Gaming is the perfect construct.”
As a result, 2017 was “the biggest” in D&D’s 44-year history, Stewart said.
He declined to disclose sales numbers but noted that in 2017, the D&D brand had a 44 percent sales growth over 2016, and the most number of players in its history — 12 million to 15 million in North America alone.
He's right, if it is currently at 15 million in NA alone, then it is bigger worldwide and the biggest D&D has ever been. In fact, it's bigger than MtG at this point if true. Ironically, it also means it's bigger than many other things. Black Panther had many repeat viewers, D&D is actually thus getting comparable to the number of players of it in relation to the number of VEIWERS (not ticket sales) of BP in NA (not equal, but comparable in relation to how big it would be as D&D players also play week after week).
If it's 15 million it SHOULD BE at around a 100+ million dollar industry just for D&D right now (once again, gotta love Stewart, wonder what his twist is on this. If it was straight up 12-15 he'd have given some sales numbers, so there's some sort of twist going on here, and I think I know what it probably is). Even at 12 million ACTIVE players, that's going to be close or surpassing 100 million.
To note, there were probably anywhere from 12 - 20 million viewers most likely for Allegiant (last of the divergent series). 15 million may seem like small change to some, but one should be seeing some pretty drastic influences right now from those numbers if it was straight up that many.
Interesting claim though. Even more so it came from Stewart and not Mearls.