Pokémon Go has grown by leaps and bounds in the few short weeks since its launch. With the whole world going crazy about this innovative game, it’s worth asking ‘how big exactly has the game grown?’
Spoiler Alert: It has grown fast. Very, very, fast.
Faster than Twitter, Tinder and Instagram. Combined!
However, growth rate isn’t everything. There’s one variable that developers care above all else; more than number of downloads, shares or tweets or tags and comments. Even More than revenue, perhaps. That variable is user engagement. It means the actual amount of time people are spending on your app/website. And in that category, more than anywhere else, Pokémon Go has absolutely obliterated every other app.
You may not understand the significance of this bar graph, so let me provide you some context. For the first time in a DECADE, an online platform has been able to generate more engagement than Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg will be screaming his head off somewhere in the Paulo Alto. Not since Modi’s get-away-from-front-of-the-camera shove has Zuckerberg felt so powerless about a situation.
Want more crazy stats? Here you go:
It took Pokémon Go just one week to gain more active users than Twitter!
We all know that Twitter is one of the most popular apps in the world. No matter what charts you look at, the little blue birdie will always be in the top 10. The power of Twitter is the high percentage of active users.
Twitter toiled for years to build this community; and somehow, this tiny little game had top Twitter in just seven days. Seven days! That’s just ridiculous.
A multi-billion dollar giant
The rise in the valuation of Niantic (the company that owns Pokémon Go) has also been equally meteoritic. Niantic had to struggle for almost 6 months to raise $ 25 million in funding. But in just 18 days from the launch, the stock of Niantic was hovering over $3 billions!
As if that wasn’t a big enough kicker, here’s one more:
Apple is set to make around $3 billions from just the in app purchases from the game!
The Guardian reported that “Pokémon Go’s ratio of paid users to total users was 10 times that of Candy Crush, the hit game from King Digital that generated more than $1bn of revenue in both 2013 and 2014.”
Here’s a snapshot of what the game has achieved so far:
There’s no question that Pokémon Go is so much more than a game. Analysts might have predicted success, but no one could have anticipated such an insane rise to power. There are some products that shock the market, some that disrupt, and then there are things like Pokémon Go, that simply obliterate the market and show a giant middle finger to the economics of scale.
