If Fortnite Were a Website, It Would Rival Reddit and Amazon (tomsguide.com)

Tom's Guide gives us some perspective on just how big of a cultural phenomenon the game Fortnite is: "if Fortnite were a website, it would be one of the top five in the United States." From the report: Take a quick look at Alexa's list of top U.S. websites, and you'll see Google, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit and Amazon in the top five. No surprises there. But as a quick Google Trends search reveals, Fortnite has become a hotter search term than Reddit. What some might see as a flash-in-the-pan gaming fad is actually outpacing one of the web's hottest destinations.

"More people in the U.S. are searching for 'Fortnite' on Google than they are for 'Reddit' and these searches have risen sharply over the last two months," said John DeFeo, VP of Internet Marketing at Purch, Tom's Guide's parent company. "When you consider that Fortnite had more than 3 million concurrent players in February, I believe that if Fortnite were a website, it would be among the top five in the U.S., duking it out with Reddit and Amazon."

Comments

Game of the week

[DogDude]

I've never heard this game until the media started writing about it this past week. Sounds like a currently popular game. Neat?

Re:Game of the week

[Calydor]

So it's like Bomberman on the SNES, but with more players?

Re:Game of the week

[Darinbob]

So popular that gaming sites are being told to popularize it even more. Even slashdot is advertising for it. Such a popular game would never go anywhere unless we spam the world about its existence!

Re:Game of the week

[Jane Q. Public]

Irrelevant.

OP's "point" is bullshit.

I had never heard of it either, until recently. As, it turns out, many of my friends had not either.

So what do they do? What did I do? Look it up on Google. As did many thousands of other people within a single week.

A peak in search activity does NOT translate into people actually going there, or playing the game.

That premise is just ridiculous.

Re: Wait, what?

[alvinrod]

Half of internet users are idiots that cannot understand how a browser works. To them, it is perfectly normal to type in the name of a website and click on the first link in Google. To them, that is the way the internet works. Smart bars were not born out of convenience, but from endless support tickets from idiots about not being able to get to a website. Most browsers even hide the full URL as the site of this terrified many a folk. These are the same people who clicked the punch the monkey banner ads and fucked up the web for the rest of us.

Re:Slashdotters: What is this 'Fortnite'?

[Darinbob]

It's just a pvp game with a slightly different twist. Any place you go to read about it will inevitably be so highly gushing in praise and amazement that you'll never know if it was a paid advertisement or a real review.

Reddit is a failing community, like /. is

[Anonymous Coward]

In my opinion, reddit is failing due to the same factors that sunk /. from being the premier technology discussion site into near total irrelevance today. In both cases we've seen abusive moderation of various forms create an intolerant 'circle-jerk' environment where original thoughts are quashed. This prevents new participants from staying very long, while the existing community ends up dwindling over time. Soon the community loses the momentum it once had, and thus begins to become less and less relevant each day. Even if the site is still operational some years later, like /. still is, it's a pathetic disgrace compared to what it once was, before abusive moderation created a rotten environment where adhering to ideology matters more than having intelligent discussion.