3 charts for you today:
If you're giving yourself some slack over your diet and exercise regime at the moment, you're not alone according to weight loss company Weight Watchers (WW). The company says they are seeing evidence of people putting "diets on hold" as economies re-open, leading them to downgrade their profit forecasts for this year — a revelation that sent the WW share price down more than 25% on Wednesday.
The yo-yo business
The yo-yo effect in dieting is well documented. People who lose weight quickly find it easy to put the weight back on which, poetically, is sort of the inverse of Weight Watchers' business. Every year the company finds it easy to add hundreds of thousands of subscribers to its weight loss program in the first quarter of the year, folks who presumably want to get healthier after the holiday period (new year new me etc.). Then, throughout the year, the company slowly sheds subscribers who presumably either meet, or give up on, their health goals.
An out of date brand?
Weight Watchers might not be able to blame all of its problems on the end of lockdowns, or just regular seasonality. In 2018 the company decided to re-brand to just "WW", dropping the iconic name it first got in 1963, to some confusion. This re-brand followed a difficult few decades for the company, which increasingly faced competition from other companies and, eventually, the internet — which made sharing healthy eating tips and tricks a lot easier, and eventually helped kick-start the body positivity movement.
The WW name change may not have been a huge initial success, but the strategic vision for the company is probably sound. WW is moving away from a singular focus on "weight" towards one of more holistic wellness — spearheaded by spokesperson Oprah Winfrey, who bought a 10% stake in the company in 2015.
By focusing on holistic wellness, WW is hoping to attach itself to a trend with a lot of longevity — unlike many of the diet trends that have come and gone in the last 20 years.
Easy come, easy go
One of the original popular diets, the Atkins diet, was still hugely popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before fading to obscurity beyond 2004, per data from Google Search Trends. The paleolithic, or caveman diet, gained some notoriety in 2011-12, and the ketogenic (keto) diet was probably the most-searched for diet of the last decade, exploding in popularity thanks to endorsements from numerous celebrities, and others, on social media.
Of course, alongside the more extreme "buzzy" diets, there are some much bigger changes happening to our eating habits as well, with more and more people going gluten free, vegetarian or vegan. Tapping into those trends, while still appealing to the widest group of people possible, is going to be quite a challenge for WW — even with Oprah as a figurehead.
Disney took another big step towards catching Netflix this week, announcing that they had signed up another 12 million subscribers to streaming platform Disney+ in the most recent quarter, bringing the company to a total of 116 million.
That's still some ways off from Netflix's 209m per our updated chart above, but it brings the gap between the two media giants subscriber bases to less than 100m. With Netflix adding just 1.5m in its most recent quarter, Disney closed the gap by about 10m. If that pace was maintained it suggests that Disney could catch and surpass Netflix's subscriber base in less than 3 years.
1) An interesting chart from The Economist showing how prevalent remote working has become in the tech community in the last 2 years, with 77% of jobs posted to a tech job board now mentioning the word "remote".
2) Taliban insurgents have captured 2 of the largest cities in Afghanistan, Kandahar and Herat, in the last 24 hours — adding to the other provincial capitals taken on Thursday.
3) Social media platform Reddit has raised another $700m of investment, valuing the company at around $10bn. Reddit currently has ~50 million daily visitors.
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5) The Messi effect is real. After signing soccer star Messi, Paris Saint-Germain's Instagram following doubled, from under 20 million to over 40 million in just a few days.
6) The US Census data is out, and it reveals the changing face of America.
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