On YouTube, ‘Pokemon Go’ Had Twice As Big A Launch As Any Other 2016 Game

Twitch is not the only online video platform benefiting from the runaway popularity of Pokemon Go. In a blog post, YouTube has shared some stats about the trendy augmented reality game. The video site noted, among other facts, that Pokemon Go received twice as much watch time in the period after its launch than the next-most watched 2016 release, Blizzard’s Overwatch.

YouTube did not specify the exact time period it defines as “the launch of Pokemon Go,” nor did it reveal an exact watchtime figure for the mobile game. Based on what we know about Overwatch, which has 775,000 subscribers and more than 85 million views on its official YouTube channel alone, Pokemon Go is quite the phenomenon; some videos related to it have rolled up tens of millions of views on their own.

YouTube did share some more concrete Pokemon Go information related to Google search data. The most exciting development concerns the game’s three teams, Mystic, Instinct, and Valor. In terms of search volume, those three terms are in a dead heat that resembles a thoroughbred horse race:

Several tangential videos and search terms have also been lifted by the rising tide that is Pokemon Go. The April Fools video that inspired the game’s development, for example, has seen a massive viewership jump. Based on data from the Wayback Machine, we can tell that in the past 16 days, the April Fools video has received more views than it picked up in the entire year before that.

Also trending upward? The Pokemon theme song, which appears to be receiving more Google search traffic than ever before. All that’s left, it would seem, is to teach Pokemon to understand the power that’s inside.