Unless you’ve been living in a cave these last two weeks you’d know that app and gaming history has been made with the unprecedented craze that is the augmented reality game Pokemon GO.

The game, in which players collect then fight Pokemon characters in the real world, has already seen a backlash (Pokemon Go backlash), been the target of a DDoS attack, and has even remarkably been said to have had a global economic impact.

But just how big is Pokemon GO?

According to figures from AppInstitute.com in the next 15 minutes from when you read this line Pokemon GO will have been download 72,998 times and Nintendo and game developer Niantic would have earned a staggering $163,099.

Extrapolate that over a day and that’s just over 7 million downloads and $15.65 million in revenue.

Week old figures from Similarweb show that Pokemon GO is now installed 10.8 percent of all phones in the United States, and it shouldn’t be forgotten that it was launched 2 weeks ago today.

Install rates continue to grow and on its current projection could see it pass Twitter and Spotify, if it hasn’t already at the time of writing.

By daily active usage numbers, Pokemon GO has already passed apps such as Twitter, Pandora Radio, Spotify and even Netflix and is rapidly approaching Snapchat.

Among those who have downloaded the app there’s no competition at all for daily time spent in the app, with users now using it twice as often as Facebook and four times more often than the next most popular game by playing time, Slither; it has also overtaken Candy Crush as the most played mobile game in history.

The BBC reports that Pokemon GO is also dominating social networks and search, with 15.3 million tweets worldwide about Pokemon Go in its first week, more than the 11.7 million for Brexit in the week of the UK referendum and double the 7.5 million tweets about the Euro 2016 football championships in its first seven days.

On Google, Pokemon GO is now a more popular search term than porn.

Amazing

Even if you don’t understand the game and don’t get what the fuss is about, there’s no question that what we are seeing with Pokemon GO is a cultural phenomenon the likes of which we have never seen before, even bigger than the now famous Windows 95 craze some 21 years ago.

The only question now is how long the craze lasts.

There’s no question that it can’t last forever although given it still hasn’t been launched globally there’s still bigger numbers to come.

Image credit: m_power/Flickr/CC by 2.0