Intel buckled to an anti-feminist campaign by pulling ads from a top gaming site, as The Verge reports today, an operation run by supporters of #GamerGate. It's the latest update in an ongoing crisis that's been wracking the game industry for several months, and is a constant discussion point among game developer and journalist colleagues. And while there's a lot that can be said about this Intel news, for now it's important to point out a key point I made a month ago: As far as we can tell, #GamerGate is numerically tiny -- probably under 10,000 supporters.

Why is this a likely estimate? For one, /KotakuInAction, a central planning hub for #GamerGate supporters on Reddit, has less than 10,000 subscribers, and if you look at how many times the #GamerGate hashtag is used on Twitter (see below), it's a safe bet that just about 10,000 supporters are making those Tweets.

Yes, it is true (as some #GamerGate advocates pointed out to me) that some related videos get views in the six figures, but as far as we can tell, those views aren't reflective of the core group. (A video that's been Tweeted or upvoted on Reddit by several thousand people can easily get that amount of views.) It's possible the movement is larger than this estimate suggests (evidence is lacking there), but even were it ten times 10,000, it would still be a small fraction of the broader market of gamers, which is roughly 150 million.

So all that said, one immediate question comes to mind: