Hi, we've got 3 charts for you today:
It's hard to remember a clip going as viral as Will Smith's outburst at this year's Academy Awards.
No such thing as bad press?
Despite the widespread condemnation of Smith's slap, the age old saying feels appropriate here, as the waning interest in the Oscars ceremony was put briefly on hold, with social media interactions about the altercation far outstripping any other news story in the 24 hours after the broadcast.
As a formal investigation gets underway, producers of the show will have to make peace with the fact that one crazy moment is unlikely to undo the sliding interest in the event. 40 million Americans used to routinely tune in to watch the event, Sunday's show got less than 17 million, and a majority of Americans had only heard of 2 of the 10 Best Picture Nominees.
The Times They Are a-Changin'
In fairness to The Academy Awards, measuring the impact of a show by its traditional broadcast numbers is increasingly archaic, given how much content is watched on streaming or social media platforms. Unfortunately, compiling data from linear TV, streaming platforms and social media interactions isn't easy... just ask Nielsen.
Measurement company Nielsen, which provided the numbers in the chart above, has been under pressure to make the transition to digital measurement, and itself has been in the headlines this week as it's set to be acquired for $16 billion.
Coming up short
TV audience and ratings data has made Nielsen an indispensable middleman between the advertising industry and the broadcast industry. Want to know how many people might see your advert in between re-runs of Seinfeld or Friends? You turn to Nielsen. Need to know how many people tuned into the Oscars live on TV? Nielsen.
But in a digital age, Nielsen has been somewhat left behind, as it tries to transition to measuring audiences in a digital world, with new streaming platforms seemingly cropping up every month.
That transition has been reflected in the company's share price, which has underperformed a US stock market that has more than tripled in value in the last 10 years, while Nielsen shares are relatively unchanged.
Whenever something major shifts, like linear TV moving to streaming, there's an entire ecosystem of businesses built around it, like measurement, that also get completely disrupted.
The yield curve flipped, turned upside down
Yesterday the US yield curve inverted — a sign that historically has been an eerily good predictor of a potential future recession, most recently when it inverted in 2006 and 2007 before the global financial crisis of 2008.
Why does this matter?
Typically, if you were lending someone money you'd expect a higher interest rate if you were going to lend to them for a longer period, say 10 years, than a shorter one, say 2 years. The same is typically true in the billion-dollar bond markets. A longer time frame usually means more time for something to go wrong (inflation, a pandemic, a war etc.), and hence a higher interest rate — which is why when that relationship flips, investors take notice.
This time the inversion was super brief, with the spread between 10-year and 2-year treasury bonds going negative for just a brief moment on Tuesday. But brief might be enough; a yield curve inversion has preceded every US recession in the past 50 years (per the FT).
1) Your smashed avocado brunch might be getting more expensive — avocado prices have hit a 24-year high as the Mexico import ban strains supply.
2) Parts of Antarctica have been 40°C hotter than the average for March — data visualized here by The Economist.
3) The anti-Instagram? A new social media app, BeReal, which prompts users into sharing the most mundane parts of their day is spreading quickly across college campuses.
4) Full house: multi-generational homes have quadrupled in the last 50 years, with more than 18% of the US population now living in a multi-generational home. See the data here.
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6) Flytrex, a company that delivers food by drone, is expanding into Texas with a view to providing drone-dropped meals in around 5 minutes.
7) Another 4.4 million Americans quit their jobs in February, just off the record 4.5 million high in November.
**This is sponsored content.
