How many people are actually playing Pokémon Go?
It seems like everyone in America is playing Pokémon Go.
It seems like everyone in America is playing Pokémon Go. For now, our best estimate is about 9.5 million daily active users.
Let us explain how we got there.
Data analytics firm SimilarWeb made a lot of noise this
week when it published data that claimed Pokémon Go was used by almost
as many people as Twitter.
It updated those numbers
Wednesday and claims 5.9 percent of all U.S. Android users opened the
Pokémon Go app on Monday, July 11. That’s almost double the 3 percent of
Android users who opened the game on July 8.
SimilarWeb doesn’t specify how many people in the U.S.
have Android devices, so let’s try to figure that one out separately.
Pew Research Center found in October that 68 percent of American adults have smartphones. According to the latest Census data
from July 2015, there are roughly 248 million U.S. adults. So that
means there are roughly 168.5 million adult smartphone owners. Cool?
Cool.
Now we turn to comScore, which found in January that 52.8 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers over the age of 13 use an Android.
For simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that number is the same for the
group of U.S. adults 18 and over. That leaves us with roughly 89 million
U.S. adult Android users.
Circling back to SimilarWeb now, which you’ll remember
found that 5.9 percent of those 89 million Android users opened Pokémon
Go on Monday. That gives us 5.25 million daily users.
Easy!
We don’t have usage data on iOS users from SimilarWeb
(the company doesn’t track iOS app usage yet). But we know from comScore
that 43.6 percent of U.S. adult smartphone subscribers have iOS
devices. That’s 73.5 million iOS smartphone users, when coupled Pew
Research data.
Let’s pretend the same percentage of people who use
Pokémon Go on Android also do so on iOS (5.9 percent). That leaves us
with approximately 4.3 million daily Pokémon Go players on iOS.
4.3 million (iOS) + 5.25 million (Android) = 9.55 million total daily U.S. users for Pokémon Go.