Hi, 3 charts for you today:
The New York Times has acquired Wordle — the viral word game — for an "undisclosed price in the low seven figures", which makes Josh Wardle, the game's creator, a millionaire at least one times over. The NYTimes also reported today that it hit 10 million total subscribers.
Stuff-that-isn't-news
For the NYTimes, buying Wordle makes a lot of sense. For the past few years, the newspaper has been trying to diversify its revenues away from just its "core news" product. Games (mostly word-based), a dedicated cooking section and audio stories have formed the bulk of its "stuff-that-isn't-news" segment, which has grown into a $22m-a-quarter business, more than 7x where it was just a few years ago. If that business was a scrappy start-up, it would almost certainly be a unicorn in today's market.
Nothing will change, until it will
Wordle will initially remain free to new and existing players once it moves over to the Times’ site... the key word of course being "initially".
The agreement gives plenty of scope for the NYTimes to eventually put Wordle behind their paywall, giving them a shot at converting the game's millions of daily players into becoming NYTimes customers, and growing that "not news" business even more.
Last weekend Rafael Nadal completed an epic comeback in the final of the Australian Open, winning the 5-and-a-half-hour match and joining home favorite Ashleigh Barty as a 2022 singles champion.
For their efforts, each pocketed $2.875m AUD, equivalent to about $2.06m USD, for a little over 2 week's work (and a lifetime of dedication to tennis of course).
Life's unfair, tennis is worse
Those huge payouts, which often grab the headlines, mask the reality of playing professional tennis for those not fortunate enough to be the best of the best. Data from the male and female tours (ATP and WTA) reveal just how hard it is to make a living.
The 500th highest-earning male tennis player in history has brought in about $1.6m in their career. That sounds like a lot but when you consider the constant travel, coaching and other costs spread over a 10 or even 15-year career, it likely translates into a modest earning, without other income. In the female game that 500th player only won $876k.
By the time you drop out of the top 1000, the numbers get small very quickly. You're the 1500th best ever male player? Congrats on $207k in lifetime earnings. Female? Just $96k.
Good 12 minute video on the topic from the FT, for those interested.
Google's parent company Alphabet was the latest member of big tech to give an update on its business yesterday, and the numbers were good... crazy good.
I'm feeling lucky
Alphabet reported quarterly revenue of about $75bn, which is up about 32% on this time last year, with just about every single segment firing on all cylinders.
YouTube ad revenue was up a healthy 25%, but it was nothing on Alphabet's main property, Google Search, which clocked in a record $43bn of quarterly revenue, growing 36% on last year. Even better than that was Google's Cloud biz, which competes with Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS, it notched revenue that was up 45% on last year.
Investors gave Google a big thumbs up, with shares rising 7% this morning. The company also announced a 20-to-1 stock split, presumably to make shares more affordable for retail investors.
1) The US National Debt has blown by the $30 trillion mark. Watch the debt tick up in real-time.
2) Tom Brady is retiring after a 22-season career, in which he broke a lot, a lot of records.
3) Tesla has recalled ~54,000 cars to remove a "rolling stop" feature that can make some vehicles roll slowly through stop signs.
4)Got $100? That's all you need to get started with Titan's Crypto portfolio, and their team of experts will invest your capital in a concentrated number of what they believe to be the best large cap crypto assets.**
5) A great visualization of countries connected to their primary trading partner.
6) The video game deals just keep coming, as Sony announced a $3.6bn acquisition of Bungie, the original studio behind the Halo universe.
**This is sponsored content.
