No company has cornered a product or service quite like how Google has dominated internet search in the western world. With more than 87% US market share (according to StatCounter), Google has never looked likely to be toppled from its perch — but that hasn't stopped people from trying.
This week a new competitor sprung up. "You" launched its service and announced a $20m round of investment from some notable venture capitalists, joining the list of rivals looking to cement second place.
Silver is still good
For a long time, the silver medal of internet search has belonged to either Yahoo! or Microsoft's Bing, each of which has held onto somewhere between 5% and 10% of the search market share for the last decade. That's a big enough slice to be worth billions to each company, but it's still nothing compared to the ~85% market share that Google has averaged during that time.
But rivals like Ecosia, which promises to plant trees with its revenue, and DuckDuckGo, which is focused much more on data privacy, have gotten some decent traction in recent years. DuckDuckGo in particular appears to be making headway, with data from StatCounter putting their market share above 2% and climbing. That's closing in on Yahoo!, and was enough progress for the company to secure $100m of investment last year.
That's impressive progress, but it's been 13 years in the making, which goes to show how hard it is to compete against a company whose product is literally a verb.
Last week the US became the latest country to go through the annual ritual of setting the clocks back one hour. That adds the US population to the millions of other people in the Northern Hemisphere that see the sun routinely setting around, or even before, 5pm (in Fairbanks, Alaska sunset is 3:58pm today).
SAD
Shorter and darker days can quite literally have an effect on all of our mental health. Seasonal Affective Disorder, which might have the most appropriate acronym ever (SAD), is a type of depression common in countries where days are shorter — and it even shows up in Google data. People search for "depression" approximately 25-30% more in the winter months relative to the summer — although Google search data is of course only a very crude measure of how people are actually feeling across a population.
SAD is surprisingly common. Around 5% of US adults are thought to affected by SAD and it manifests itself like all other types of depression; low-energy, anxiety, over-eating, sluggishness and feelings of melancholy or apathy.
So as the days get shorter keep an eye on your friends, family and yourself — there are some good resources on SAD and its symptoms here, and some more general resources for depression here.
P.S. Great animated visual from Neil Kaye on hours of daylight around the world.
The New York Times is the biggest English-language news organization in the world, counting almost 8.4 million paid subscribers as of its latest update from last week.
How it makes its money has changed — and is changing — quite dramatically.
Shifting sands
Like many other modern media entities, the NYTimes has been fundamentally changing its business model in two ways. There's the ongoing shift from print revenue to digital revenue, but also an ongoing shift away from advertising into subscription revenue — which companies like because it's usually more predictable.
Most of the NYTimes subscribers, 7.6 million to be exact, are digital-only. That's folks reading news online, in-app, or subscribing to some of their other digital subscription products like its cooking or games sections. Despite being the vast majority of subscriptions that group only accounts for ~40% of revenue. Even accounting for digital advertising, digital only makes up just over half of all revenue.
That's because, even though it's dying, print is still a chunk of the core business. A year ago the New York Times had 831,000 print subscribers. Today it has 795,000, a 4% drop in a time when everything has been going online. Print is dying, but it's taking its time. Maybe it'll never die? Or make a comeback like Vinyl.
1) A parent on reddit has visualized every single day of sleep for the first year of their newborn daughter's life.
2)Robinhood has confirmed that 5 million customer email addresses and 2 million customer names were compromised during a hack last week.
3) Squid Game is a perfect example of the globalization of the streaming boom — and it's causing a shortage of translators.
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5) US inflation just hit 6.2% year-on-year, the highest reading for 30 years.
6) NASA's return to the moon has been pushed back a year, with the space agency now expecting to land the first woman and 13th man on the lunar surface in 2025.
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