The headlines this morning were impressive; rapper Travis Scott was able to get 12 million players to log onto Fortnite at the same time to see his "Astronomical" concert. Scott was digitized in-game and performed new songs to gamers around the world with plenty of trippy and surreal imagery. 

Fortnite is one of the most popular games in the history of video games and has been the go-to place for sponsorships, franchise tie-ins, surprise celebrity cameos, and even a Star Wars event that preluded The Rise of Skywalker.

Scott is an award-winning rapper, selling millions of records, and instead of performing at Coachella this summer (it got canceled), the next best thing was performing in front of a virtual crowd. It's hard to get 12 million people to tune into an NBA game, harder to get them all to buy tickets for an event, and impossible to find a venue that can hold them all.

And yet, 12 million gamers and fans logged onto the game, with an additional 887,000 going onto Twitch.tv, to watch it live. Which is downright astonishing when you look at the data we pulled about the game.

For some perspective, Fortnite had 84.7K viewers yesterday at 11 AM. Most games would kill to have those numbers, and by 11 PM there were 887K viewers watching the game. That's an increase, in 12 hours, of 947%. 

More than 200K people were talking about Fortnite on Facebook, which is a high watermark for the game. 100,000 people also followed the Fortnite Twitter account this week, leading up to the Travis Scott concert.

If you missed out on the first concert, there will be encore performances this weekend. Or just watch YouTube videos, that's always an option.

About the Data:

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

Further Reading: 

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