← The Fortnite Brand Index · methodology v2
The Fortnite Brand Index — methodology v2
The FBI is a number that moves daily, not a directory. This doc defines how it's computed, what the sub-indices ("ETFs") are, and the rules that keep it honest.
The headline number
FBI = total live audience across all verified official brand & IP islands — the sum of constituents' daily peak concurrent players. Market-cap style, like "total brand attention on the platform," reported daily.
Today (11 Jun 2026): 31,554 · All-time high: 124,666 (9 May 2026, Droid Tycoon era) · base period Apr 2023.
Design decision, learned the hard way: we deliberately do not use a divisor-chained price index (S&P style). In this market every constituent enters at its peak and decays, so a chained index can only ever fall — it hides exactly the events that matter. Launches and deaths are the signal; an aggregate shows them.
Sub-indices (the ETF layer)
Same computation, applied to category subsets.
| Ticker | Bundle | Current constituents |
|---|---|---|
| FBI | All official brand/IP islands | 6 |
| FBI-ENT | Entertainment & IP (film/TV/games IP) | Star Wars, SpongeBob, Sinners island |
| FBI-EVENTS | Music & live events | Coachella ×2 |
| FBI-AUTO | Automotive | Lamborghini |
| NATIVE | Native creator benchmark (not brand work — the bar) | The Kraken |
| VENUE | The Venue Index — maps that host integrations (tracked separately, see venues.json) | Speed Realistics, Minigame Box PVP, Kagami |
New ETFs mint themselves as categories reach 2+ constituents (fashion, sport, QSR…). The NATIVE line is plotted against FBI on every chart — it's the honesty device, and it already produced the index's first headline: for ~18 months (mid-2023 to mid-2025), one indie boss-fight map out-drew every official brand island in Fortnite combined.
Constituent rules
Entry: verified official activations only (scope policy in islands.json) — enter on launch day with full backfilled history where available.
Exit: delisted islands stay in history (their rise and death is data) but contribute 0 forward. Noted in the changelog.
Campaigns vs islands (the Sinners rule): a campaign with both a custom island and integrations is one campaign entity with components: its island contributes to FBI; its integrations are measured under the Borrowed Audience methodology against VENUE constituents — never double-counted, never conflated. Presentation must group them (one campaign card, two component rows), not list them as unrelated entries.
Changelog discipline: every constituent add/remove is a dated public note. As coverage grows from 6 constituents toward the verified full set, historical FBI values are recomputed and the revision noted — the index gets more complete backward as well as forward. We say this on the page deliberately: it's a feature of a growing index, not a correction to hide.
Known limits (publish these)
Peak CCU is the only metric with deep history (via fortnite.gg, credited); from June 2026 our own Epic-API archive adds uniques, minutes, and retention, enabling a future minutes-weighted index (FBI-M) that better represents engagement than concurrency.
Coverage is 6 verified constituents and growing — the trough may shallow slightly as pre-2025 activations are verified and backfilled.
Numbers are platform-public; advertiser-side metrics (impressions, conversions) are out of scope.
Computation
cloud_collector/build_index.py recomputes all series daily from data/history/ (backfills) + data/daily/ (our archive) → data/index/fbi_series.json. The site chart reads that file raw from the repo.
Chart spec: FBI line (purple) + NATIVE line (green), log scale, annotations on era events; sub-index toggle chips; the daily FBI number rendered big, ticker-style, with Δ vs 7 days ago.