3 charts for you today:
Square, the other tech company run by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, has agreed to buy Aussie fintech company Afterpay for a cool $29bn.
Buy now, pay later
Afterpay is one of a number of companies that makes it easy for consumers to pay for things in installments, rather than all at once, and its popularity has skyrocketed in the last few years, along with a few rivals like Affirm and Swedish company Klarna.
Buy now, pay now (in shares)
Only a small handful of companies have $29 billion of loose cash lying around to spend on an acquisition — and Square isn't one of them. In fact, Square isn't stumping up any cash for the deal, doing the entire thing in equity by offering 0.375 shares of Square in exchange for each share of Afterpay. That's pretty savvy, because the value of a share in Square has more than quadrupled since the start of 2020 as the pandemic turned out to be great for its digital payment solutions and investing products.
It's all coming together
Buy now pay later is hardly a radical new idea. Traditional financing options for cars, phones, fashion and of course homes have existed for literally hundreds of years. All Afterpay does it make it really easy for its 16 million users to defer payments at the point of sale, while charging no interest or fees (unless they miss a payment). For Square this deal means they can now offer the Afterpay feature to its thousands of merchants, and give Afterpay users the ability to manage their payments in Cash App, Square's digital payments app.
One show to rule them all
Lord of the Rings is returning to the screen. The small screen, that is.
This week Amazon announced that the Lord of the Rings TV show is officially set for a September 2022 release on its streaming service, offering a teaser picture for fans along with the announcement.
The LOTR TV show will be hoping to follow in the footsteps of the most recent and well-known adaptations of Tolkien's work; the six movies produced and directed by Peter Jackson from 2001 to 2014.
The original LOTR trilogy was an all-round cinematic success, scoring highly with both audiences and critics, as well as taking roughly $3bn at the global box office, on a budget of less than $300m. The second trilogy set in Middle-Earth, based on Tolkien's 1937 book The Hobbit, was also a solid success — doing well at the global box office despite slightly more lukewarm reviews, particularly with critics.
Spend money, to make money
Producers of the LOTR TV show will be hoping to replicate those results on the small screen, and they've certainly been set up for success, with the first season (just the first season) set to cost a truly astonishing $465m. For some context on how enormous that number is in the world of TV budgets; the final season of Game of Thrones cost just $90m, Disney spent "around" $100m on the first season of the Mandalorian and the first season of The Crown cost around $130m (source: The Verge).
TikTok might be the hottest social media company around right now, dominating the lists of the most downloaded apps, but its older cousin Snapchat is quietly making headway as well — announcing recently that they have almost hit 300 million daily active users.
3 years ago Snapchat wasn't in great shape. Kylie Jenner didn't like its redesign (which actually moved the stock) and Instagram had copied its best feature (stories). User growth had stalled, and even gone negative for a few quarters, and the users it did have it wasn't monetizing very well, eking out less than $0.50 a month in average revenue per user.
Fast forward to today and things look very different. Mini apps, tweaks to the design, a new android app and an investment into AR (lenses and filters) that is now paying off has meant that since mid-2018 SNAP has added more than 100 million daily active users, and more than doubled the amount it gets in advertising revenue from each one.
1) Zoom is set to pay $85m to settle a class-action lawsuit brought about by "Zoombombings", when unwanted visitors would enter a Zoom chatroom and wreak havoc. If you've been a paying Zoom customer you may get a (small) piece of the settlement pie.
2) New York City will require proof of vaccination in order to enter all restaurants, gyms and indoor entertainment venues. The news comes as hospital admissions for COVID-19 have begun to rise across the US, although they remain well below the winter peak
3) Amazon wants to offer people $10 in exchange for enrolling their biometric data in their palm print recognition system, which is a pretty dystopian headline if we've ever seen one.
4) Over 2,000 businesses around the world rely on Sisense for game-changing business insights. Find out why they trust Sisense to go beyond business intelligence to infuse analytics everywhere.**
5) 13-year-old Sky Brown just won Olympic bronze in the park skateboarding final.
6) China's state media has fired a warning shot to the video game industry, wiping billions off the value of Tencent, China's gaming giant.
**This is sponsored content.
