Happy Friday folks! We've got 3 charts for you today exploring:
You can't vape with us
Yesterday the FDA announced that Juul cannot sell its e-cigarettes in the US anymore — a huge blow for a company that was recently one of the most highly-valued startups in all of America.
Juul was the brainchild of two graduate students of product design at Stanford who wanted to make cigarettes that were healthier, better smelling... and cooler. They succeeded.
After launching in 2015 it took just a few short years for Juul's e-cigarette to hit the big time. Its USB-stick-looking vaporizer came in flavors like mango, creme and mint and teenagers loved them. By late 2017 they had 20% of the e-cigarette market. One year later they had over 70%. Juul seemed unstoppable, and big tobacco took notice.
Up in smoke
Juul Labs had been spun out of its parent company, and had notched a substantial valuation in private markets as its sales exploded. Then tobacco giant Altria — which owns storied cigarette brand Marlboro among many others — made Juul Labs an offer; $12.8bn for a 35% stake, valuing Juul at $38bn, and making it one of the most valuable startups, or even private companies, in the US.
At the time Altria's offer probably looked half-sensible. In hindsight it might be one of the worst-timed ever. Juul's popularity, particularly with teenagers, brought a regulatory investigation almost immediately, and a ban on some of its most popular flavors swiftly followed.
After 40+ years of declining cigarette sales and graphic public health warnings about the damage that smoking causes, it might be easy to think of big tobacco as a frail industry on its deathbed — it's anything but. In fact, even in the wake of falling sales, Altria has eked out record earnings over the last decade. The $12-13bn that it has presumably lost on the Juul deal is an enormous sum... but it's one that Altria can — quite easily — afford. It's racked up operating income of more than $10bn for the last 3 years in a row. Big tobacco is still just that... big.
A new report from the Reuters Institute & Oxford University has found that interest in the news cycle has dropped. In the US the proportion of people who are "very" or "extremely" interested in news has fallen from 67% in 2015 to 47% last year — a trend that was also found in other countries such as the UK, Spain, Germany and Brazil.
Why is this happening?
There are a few potential explanations. One is just that we're all exhausted by the news cycle of the last few years which has featured highly polarized politics, a global pandemic, inflation and geopolitical tensions to name but a few stories. Another potential reason is more structural — that as news is increasingly digital it's actually easier to get disconnected from it, through choice or by algorithms that learn you're not that interested. Interestingly the proportion of people who actively avoid the news also rose to a new high of 42% of those surveyed in the US.
Related data: Our friends at Axios visualized the fade in the "Trump bump" — which saw both left-leaning and right-leaning news sites gain website traffic during his presidency.
P.S. Interest in chart-based newsletters is actually rising.
1) The Austrian capital, Vienna, is back on top of The Economist's annual list of the World's Most Liveable Cities.
2) Netflix has confirmed it is laying off another 300 employees, while also confirming that the ad-supported tier is in development.
3) A Japanese man has lost a USB stick with an entire city's personal details on it (data on more than 500,000 people).
4) Our friends at CB Insights have collated 29 pitch decks of startups that went on to become huge, including Airbnb, BuzzFeed and Facebook.
5) The senate has voted 65 to 33 to pass the bipartisan gun control bill, which incentivizes states to pass red flag laws and close certain loopholes.
6) A Web3 startup hired a Snoop Dogg impersonator to drum up hype for their company at the NFT NYC conference.
