How Pokemon Go took over the web

Gamer with a Pokemon phoneGetty Images

In the week that political resignations, leadership battles and market turmoil dominated news headlines, a certain monster-hunting mobile game was busy making waves online.

Pokemon Go's mixture of gaming and reality has proved a huge success.

While Twitter remains a firm favourite for political chatter, app analytics firm SimilarWeb says Pokemon Go now has more daily users on Android phones in the US than the social media firm.

SimilarWeb says players are using Pokemon Go for an average of 43 minutes a day - that's more than Whatsapp, Instagram or Snapchat.

Since the game makes players walk around to hunt Pokemon, it means an average man playing the game for seven days would burn 1,795 calories - and a woman would burn 1,503. Converted into a tastier measure, that could be seven small chocolate doughnuts for a man - or six for a woman.

There were 15.3 million tweets worldwide about Pokemon Go in its first week. That's 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.

Online searches for the game have spiked too - there have been almost as many Google searches worldwide for Pokemon Go as there were for Brexit on the day the UK voted to leave the European Union.

Even pornography, an enduring internet fascination, has been overtaken by interest in the app.

Now something for the players.

While the main method of catching Pokemon is simply to find them, to get the rarer ones you could try hatching some eggs.

Players can collect eggs at Pokestops - real world landmarks that appear in the game - but you have to walk a certain distance for them to hatch. The rarest Pokemon hatch from eggs after a 10km (6 mile) walk - then 5km and 2km for the more common creatures.

There's a handy breakdown in the graphic below.

With the game now having been released in the UK and expected to be released in many more countries soon, it is a fair guess that Pokemon Go's popularity will continue.

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