February 12, 2021

Today's Topics

3 charts for you today:

  • Easy come, easy go. When was each social media platform generating its peak search interest on Google?
  • Uber Eats. How Uber's "second business" shone in 2020.
  • Inflation. Markets are anticipating higher inflation in the future.
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Remember Myspace? What about Friendster or Bebo? In the short history of the internet, there have been many social media platforms that have shot to fame before fading to black. We've charted the Google search volume for 9 of them since 2005 to see when each was generating its "peak buzz" on Google.

Easy come, easy go

For the old school platforms the charts offer few surprises — steep rises and sharp drop offs as they were replaced and forgotten (we still love you Myspace Tom).

Some, such as TikTok, ascend to mainstream adoption like a rocket ship. Others, such as Reddit, have had a much more gentle path. Since its launch in 2005 it's never been anywhere near as popular as Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat — but for those 15 years search interest for Reddit has always climbed, and just this week the company raised a fresh round of investment at a $6bn valuation.

Twitter turns things around

Perhaps the most interesting trajectory of any company in this chart is Twitter. In 2015 the number of people searching for Twitter was dropping off and it was failing to attract new users at the same rate it used to. For most social media platforms, this was usually a one-way street — once a decline had started, no other had managed to reverse it. Then things changed.

Maybe it was the election of President Trump, who used Twitter more intensely than any world leader before him. Or maybe it was simply because Twitter's often text-first content was timelier than the image and video focus of other platforms. Whatever the reason, Twitter has turned things around, and is once again growing — their most recent numbers revealed 192 million active users, up 27% on last year.

So maybe you can turn a social media platform around when it starts to stagnate, but relaunching one completely from scratch — surely that's too hard? We'll soon find out, because it's exactly what the original founders are trying to do with Bebo — which they plan to relaunch this month.

Want us to add more social media platforms to this chart? Hit reply, and we'll add them next time.

2020 was a bad year to be in the ride-hailing business. For Uber, revenue in their mobility business was down 52%. Fortunately they have been busy building Uber Eats into a food delivery giant — which helped to soften the blow of the pandemic. Indeed, Uber's food delivery business has been taking in more in gross bookings than the mobility division for the last 3 quarters in a row.

You'd be forgiven for thinking then that Uber might have made a decent profit last year, as food delivery boomed. They actually lost $6.8 billion, which remarkably, is actually a 20% improvement on the $8.5 billion they lost the year before.

Holding the faith

Uber shares are still 40% higher now than they were this time last year (pre-pandemic). Investors are clearly still confident that at some point Uber will turn its scale into actual profits — but just how much scale is it going to take?

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Is inflation coming?

Markets are now beginning to price in the possibility that meaningful inflation returns to the US economy. The 10-year breakeven inflation rate, which is essentially a market measure of future inflation expectations based on US treasury yields, has been rising ever since March of last year, when expectations plummeted at the start of the pandemic.

After pumping so much stimulus into the economy it's perhaps no surprise that investors are expecting inflation to make a comeback. The worry is that the economy could begin to overheat, and inflation could start to spiral higher.

How would inflation affect me?

Over the long term inflation erodes the purchasing power of your income, but assuming that it's only a few % a year that can take some years to feel noticeable. Instead higher inflation is much more likely to trigger some more dramatic moves in the stock market, or housing sector, if the Federal Reserve decides to raise interest rates to combat it. For now though they seem pretty chilled about it.

DATA SNACKS

1) 31-year-old Whitney Wolf Herd is now officially a self-made billionaire. The founder and CEO of Bumble saw her wealth rise dramatically after Bumble debuted on the stock exchange, with shares rising more than 70% on its first day of trading.

2) Facebook is set to trial a change in its algorithm that will show less political content to its users on their main news feed. Currently Facebook claims that only around 6% of what people see on Facebook is political in nature.

3) Amsterdam has superseded London as the largest share trading hub in Europe, averaging more than €9bn of trading volume per day in January, ahead of London which has seen its share trading volume halve.

4) Disney+ hit a new high of 94.9 million subscribers, surpassing its original target of 90 million — which it anticipated to take 4 years — in just 14 months.

5) The UK economy shrank by 9.9% last year, which was more than twice the previous record for an annual decline.

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