July 18, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The smartphone game taking the Internet — and its players’ attention — by storm has gotten so popular it has grabbed more notice on the World Wide Web in the last few days than porn.
Since Pokémon Go was released July 6, the game consistently drew more online searches than the term “porn” between 6:30 p.m. July 10 and 4:30 p.m. ET Friday, July 15, according to Google Trends, maintaining a substantial lead for nearly all of that time.
Pokémon Go is the top app in the iOS App Store, the digital media site Nerdist.com reports, and people are using it more than WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
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But what might arguably be the real surprise with the location-based augmented reality mobile game is its surpassing of porn in Internet searches.
“It turns out it was more loved than any of us realized, as by certain metrics, Pokémon Go is more popular than one of the main pillars of the internet — porn,” the Nerdist post said. “We assumed that being able to catch Pokémon in the real world would be a smashing success, but we had no way of knowing that it would be this big, enough to overtake our sex drives for internet supremacy.”
The sensational popularity of the game has been credited with, or blamed for, countless spectacles and incidents across the U.S. because of its attention-grabbing nature as people find themselves in various locations and unforeseen situations while out playing the game.
It’s so popular that some fitness trackers have reported that users logged a huge increase in steps its first weekend in conjunction with playing Pokémon Go, and a New Zealand man quit his job to become a full-time Pokémon hunter for the next two months.
The game’s draw has been so great that Arlington National Cemetery and the United States Holocaust Museum have asked visitors to refrain from playing while on their grounds.
Two Marines playing in California helped police catch an attempted murder suspect while playing, a Wyoming woman located an accidental drowning victim, and a group playing in Cincinnati came across an unresponsive couple in a car and got them help, and a Houston group discovered some abandoned animals in distress.
Safety concerns have also emerged for those in the midst of the game, as armed robbers targeted victims in Missouri by tracking them with one of the game’s features, an Oregon man was stabbed while out playing, an upstate New York man drove into a tree distracted by Pokémon Go, a Texas teen was bitten by a venomous snake, and two men in southern California fell off a cliff.
The addictive nature and pervasiveness of pornography, specifically on the Web, was illustrated in a 2012 study by a technology magazine estimating that porn websites make up as much as a third of the Internet’s total traffic.
And as the Republican National Convention is poised to consider declaring Internet pornography a public health crisis at its convention this week, it remains to be seen how long the Pokémon Go phenomenon will outdo porn for attention in cyberspace.