CryptoKitties are Furring up the Ethereum Blockchain

Digital pets have been purring electronically for almost 20 years. Starting in the late 90s with physical toys that included a digital element, like Furby and Tamagotchi, before moving online to Neopia where children earned Neopoints to feed and groom their Neopets. Last Holiday Season saw the trend move back into the physical world when Hatchimals was named the “hit toy of the season“. This year digital pets have gone virtual once more with a special 2017 twist. CryptoKitties is an online game where digital felines can only be purchased using Ethereum, a blockchain-based currency.

CryptoKitties was developed by Axiom Zen and launched at cryptokitties.co exactly a week ago. Following the initial press release, there were a couple of key articles about the new game at qz.com and techcrunch.com which sent traffic to the nascent site soaring.

Globally, this massive spike in traffic is weighted towards desktop over mobile by just over 2:1. In the US, which is responsible for around 40% of the total traffic to cryptokitties.co the split between desktop and mobile traffic is almost even.

Traffic Sources

To go from a standing start to a viral smash in seven days takes careful planning and a high degree of luck. Looking at worldwide sources of traffic over the last 28 days up to December 3, 2017 (now updated to the last 28 days up to December 4, 2017, see below) paints a picture of how CryptoKitties went from an idea that no one had heard of, to a hit that was responsible for “15% of all Ethereum network traffic” according to the TechCrunch article. The numbers suggest a huge word-of-mouth success which may be nowhere near reaching its full potential. Almost 43% of the site’s traffic came directly to cryptokitties.co, meaning users knew exactly what to type into the address bar. Furthermore, over 90% of the organic search traffic was actually people searching for the term cryptokitties or a variation of it. That kind of instant brand awareness is every marketer’s dream and some of it may be down to the articles at Quartz and TechCrunch which were directly responsible for half of all the referral traffic to the site. Traffic from social networks also generated an impressive proportion of traffic over the past 28 days with Reddit the most significant source, responsible for 5.7% of all traffic to cryptokitties.co.

Only time will tell whether CryptoKitties is having a moment or if it will live out all its nine lives, but for now, it looks like a purr-fect product launch.

Next-Day Update

Taking in another 24 hours to include the last 28 days up to December 4, it’s clear that CryptoKitties is spreading around the world, with the US share of total traffic now reduced to 35% with a swing towards desktop traffic, as more articles have started appearing in Russia and other countries. The value of this continued press coverage for the brand remains high as the proportion of traffic from referrals hit a new peak of 22.9% of all traffic to cryptokitties.co.

by Similarweb