How Many People Are in GamerGate?
May 08, 2015
GamerGate is a consumer revolt against unethical journalism with many allies, especially pro-free speech and anti-censorship allies like myself.
Some have accused me of "joining" GamerGate to get e-famous. That's sort of silly for a couple of reasons.
First, I have an established track record of hating censorship. Go reach my archives back from 2004 and ask yourself what my opinion is on censorship. It hasn't changed. I oppose it and will spend my own money to fight it.
Second, I was already e-famous. Crime & Federalism, back when it was a seriously legal blog, was widely read. I've been cited in federal court opinions and law reviews. Haters gonna hate, but yeah, people know me.
I've been recognized in cafes worldwide and can hold a meet-up in any city in the world and have people show up. No one says, "Are you Mike from GamerGate?!" They have all said, "Are you Mike from Danger & Play?"
I didn't need GamerGate to get e-famous, and if anything it has a poor ROI for my primary businesses. I teach mindset techniques, have a mindset book coming out, and sell juicing books. I don't see a massive intersection between gamers and mindset training and green juicing, but if sales data proves me wrong, I'll gladly eat my words.
GamerGate is massive. Some data analysis shows 250,000 people have posted to the hashtag.
I don't have the Big Data on GamerGate, but I do have my own data. And I'm happy to share it.
Let's look at my growth in Twitter followers. Keep in mind I'm highly controversial. I even post deliberately shocking and outrageous tweets, because that's sort of fun.
Actually, I post the shocking tweets because my book is called Gorilla Mindset. If a few tweets make you cry, you're not going to read or apply my mindset techniques. So...Good riddance.
Thus, I'm a niche "name" in GamerGate. People who are into self-improvement and dark humor enjoy me. The rest...not so much.
Most people in GamerGate find my humor to be a bit too gallows-based, and that's cool. Celebrate diversity!
On net I've gained around 10,000 followers via my pro-#GamerGate position. I consistently gained 500 new followers a month before GamerGate, so it's hard to say for sure how many of my new Twitter followers are from GamerGate. But I'm comfortable with saying it's 10,000 or so.
I currently have around 24,000 Twitter followers. Many of those are fake, as SJWs bought me fake followers in an effort to get me in trouble with Twitter.
My best guess is 15,000 of my Twitter followers are real.
Here's my GamerGate data.
In September, I thought GamerGate was sort of stupid, as I didn't understand it. I didn't start posting earnestly to the GamerGate hashtag until October. I stopped posting to the hashtag often in December or so, although I do still post about GamerGate.
I've included my Analytics page from Twitter. The analytics will give you a sense of how many people are in GamerGate.
September 2014: 752 tweets, 2.25 million impressions 48,300 profile visits, 400 new followers
October 2014: 1,569 tweets, 17,600,000 million impressions 550,000 profile visits, 4,800 new followers
November, 2014: 2,248 tweets, 14,500,000 million impressions 355,000 profile visits 2,730 new followers.
December, 2014: 2,846 tweets, 13,600,000 million impressions 560,000 profile visits 16,400 new followers (many of those were fake).
Anyhow, the data doesn't lie.
GamerGate is a massive consumer revolt. GamerGamer is too big to ignore and too diverse to pigeon hole.
Some people like me are a bit off the reservation. Others are serious and temperate.
We are legion, and we are not going away.
Read next: What is GamerGate?