Delicious Digest #13 - Millenials, Tycoons, and Physicists
A weekly newsletter of what I’ve seen in (mostly) tech & games and thought was interesting. This week: Millenials, Tycoons, and Physicists.
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😳 Must reads of the week
◼ Instagram has made $20 billion (!) from ads. Insane. This is also considerably more than YouTube’s estimated $15b and with a higher profit margin, since YouTube shares revenue with content creators (Instagram doesn’t). Link
◼ “Supercell’s off year”. Well, $1.56 billion revenue and $577m profit is not bad for an off year. But it’s clear that they are looking for the next big thing. Link
See also: Supercell’s CEO’s take in his blog post. Link
🗞 News
◼ Spotify has bought another podcast business, this time “The Ringer”, a sports podcast. Podcasts are growing surprisingly fast after years of quiet. Spotify is looking for ways to acquire or produce its own content, just like Netflix has done. Hard to predict the outcome, which makes it an interesting area to watch. Link
◼ Google has paid $80bn to Android developers – about half of what Apple has paid ($155bn) on less than half of the install base. Google won the reach war, Apple the money war. Which one has more room to grow? Link
◼ Disney Plus has 28.6m subscribers. Not a bad start for (mostly) US only. But still a long way to catch up to Netflix' 167m. Link
◼ Apple is predicted to sell more than 100 million wireless headphones in 2020. Wearables have become their biggest hit by far in recent history with over 60% in revenue market share. Link
◼ Tesla short sellers have lost $16 billion since 2016. Totally bonkers. Especially since Tesla’s share price arguably is vastly inflated right now. Link
◼ Computer scientists have found a novel approach that significantly improves the storage efficiency and output speed. Link
◼ The amount of time millennials and Gen Zs spend on social platforms is either flat, declining, or not rising less. Well, kind of. But behaviour is changing: more closed messaging groups, less public amassing of “friends” and followers. Link
🕹 Games
◼ Ubisoft acquires Idle Miner Tycoon developer Kolibri Games. Link
◼ Meanwhile, Ubisoft had a rough Q4-2019 with revenue’s down 26%. Link
◼ “What I learned about community management from my immigrant parents”. Good CM is hard and requires a lot of patience & grit. Link
◼ Some players are still very upset about Warcraft III remastered. In response, Blizzard is now offering automatic (!) refunds. Sounds expensive. Link
◼ PUBG Mobile was the top-grossing mobile game for the fifth month in a row - 50% of which is China. Very impressive run. Who would have predicted that back when Fortnite entered mobile? Link.
See also: Top Mobile Games by Worldwide Revenue for January 2020. Link
◼ Stellaris has (finally) soft-launched on iOS and Android. Couldn’t play yet but I am very curious, I hope it’s finally a proper good take on classic 4X for mobile. Link
😋 Tasty Tidbits
◼ 40 powerful concepts for understanding the world in 40 tweets. Tasty tidbits per excellence. Link (via Abel Fernandez)
◼ Bringing up past injustices, such as discrimination of women in the workplace, make majority groups just more defensive. It’s better (= faster progress) to highlight positive recent improvements. Link
◼ From The PIG Archives™: Bert & Ernie’s Gangsta-Rap. If this doesn’t make you happy, you’re dead inside. Link (Video)
◼ No joke: no one can really explain why planes stay in the air. This is both very intriguing and insanely frustrating to the physicist in me. It also does no good to my latent fear of flying. Link
I work for King. All views in this newsletter are personal and my own. They do not represent the views of King or ActivisionBlizzard. This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only and it’s surely no investment advice. This newsletter links to other websites and information obtained from third-party sources and I cannot ensure nor verify accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.