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Today's Topics
Happy December everyone, today we're exploring:
- Why Mariah Carey must have a love-hate relationship with Christmas time.
- How China continues to dominate the global education league tables.
- The "Google Guys" are stepping back. What challenges does the search giant face?
The numbers behind the numbers:
3 charts, 838 words, 4 mins 55 seconds to read.
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Mariah Carey must both love and hate the Christmas period. On the one hand she must be slightly sick of hearing her own song over and over again. But in her other hand is a big cheque for all her royalty fees.
Arguably the most famous Christmas song of modern times "All I Want for Christmas Is You" entered the Spotify Top 200 chart at the start of November, and it hasn't looked back since, climbing steadily over the last 5 weeks, before peaking on December 1st at just over 4 million streams, firmly within the top 10.
So how much does Mariah make?
Spotify reportedly pays between $0.006 and $0.0084 per play. So for November Mariah's 37.8 million streams might be worth between $226k and $317k - although that may be split between the record label and other producers.
That's pretty good going for not much effort. But it starts to really boggle the mind when you consider:
1) That's only Spotify... never mind Apple Music, Deezer, Amazon Music etc.
2) That doesn't include YouTube, music video views, CD sales or downloads.
3) That doesn't include sync rights (if it gets used in movies, adverts or other media).
4) That was just November. December will be many times bigger. Last year it hit over 8 million streams on Spotify on Christmas day.
Merry Christmas Mariah!
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China has once again topped the rankings from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), with the top scores in maths, reading & science (science not shown on this chart).
For the UK, US, Canada & Australia maths seems to play second fiddle to strong reading scores. In the US that trend is particularly apparent; the US ranks 13th globally for reading, but is only 36th in mathematics.
Why does China do so well?
The paradox at play here is that - whilst growing very quickly - China's economy is still far behind much of the english speaking world. According to the World Bank China's GDP per capita is just shy of $10k, compared to $42.5k in the UK, $57.3k in Australia and over $60k in the US - and yet despite such a wide funding gap - they continue to get top scores year after year?
One explanation is that the students tested were only from four, mostly urban, regions in China: Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. More rural areas might not have scored quite as highly.
Another explanation, while something of a generalisation, would be to say that China simply works its students a lot harder, and puts more of an emphasis on core subjects like reading and maths, at the expense of the arts and humanities. There's certainly some truth to that notion, with some students in Shanghai reporting that they spend more than 70 hours a week studying, with 3+ hours of homework a night, and extra classes on Sundays.
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Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have recently announced that they would be stepping down from their day-to-day roles at Google, leaving Sundar Pichai as the CEO.
Strong leadership is going to be important for Google as the spotlight of regulation continues to intensify on big technology companies. While Facebook grapples with fake news, political advertising and hate-speech, Google is struggling to re-invent itself in two ways.
The first is that Google has to continue to convince the regulator that it's a benevolent monopoly. With over 90% market share of internet searches (source statcounter), Google has to be careful to present a level playing field to everyone who uses it. That's something it has already fallen foul of with the EU, which has fined it on 3 separate occasions (to the tune of almost $10bn) for antitrust violations of its AdSense platform.
The second is to try and diversify itself away from its dependency on search and advertising revenue. That's something the departing founders have been focused on for a while with projects in life sciences, self-driving cars and even anti-ageing technology. However, in 2018, those "other bets" represented just 0.4% of total revenue. Google is still searching for that next big thing.
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Data Snacks
1) There's no such thing as bad press. Unless you're home-fitness cycling company Peloton, whose latest advert has sparked a backlash that's partly to blame for wiping almost $1.5bn off the company's value this week.
2) Premium journalism is too expensive right? Thanks to Mogul News it doesn’t have to be. For less than $5 a month you can read handpicked stories from premium publishers such as The Economist & Bloomberg. Try the 7-day free trial, cancel anytime.*
3) Saudi Aramco is officially the world's most valuable public company. The IPO raised $25.6bn, and valued the whole company at roughly $1.7tn.
4) James Bond #25: No Time To Die is coming in April 2020. The trailer, which has already got almost 10 million views, is here if you're interested.
5) We've officially gone full circle; for $60 (£45) you can now buy an AirPods carrying strap to make sure you never lose your wireless AirPods.
*This is a sponsored snack.
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We have good news!
Starting in January 2020, you'll be getting 2 newsletters a week. This Friday edition is staying put, and we're adding a Wednesday one as well.
Same format. Lots of charts, lots of facts and more data snacks than ever. Have ideas for us? We'd love to hear from you, just reply to this email, or click one of the links below!
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