The average nursing home stay is ~835 days, or 2.3 years. The world’s oldest living person, Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera, has taken the decimal right out of there — she’s been at the same nursing home for 23 years. It must be one hell of a facility: Morera is hard of hearing and has limited mobility, but those were her only complaints as she turned 117 this week.
In today’s email:
Cable TV: It still exists, but barely.
Tall tales: How a con man sold the Eiffel Tower — twice.
Not necessary: A glittery way to piss off your dentist.
Around the web: A new ChatGPT feature, Dream’s face reveal, cat psychology, and more.
👇 Listen: Dartmouth sucks at basketball, but its team just changed the business model of college sports.
The Big Idea
The ghosts of old shows are the scariest things on TV
Network TV reruns are taking over cable television.
2024-03-06T00:00:00Z
Sara Friedman
It’s 2am on a Wednesday and the whole world is asleep — the only sound is the hum of the refrigerator and the laugh track of “The King of Queens” wafting out of your TV.
Dated sitcoms are a nostalgic portal to the past and a fixture of TV’s present, with reruns typifying the expected content on today’s cable channels.
But those channels are struggling: most have lost the majority of their audiences and nearly given up on creating new content, perThe Associated Press.
Between 2014 and 2023, Nielsen data shows that:
MTV’s average prime-time audience dove from 807k to 256k.
USA Network’s audience shrank 69%.
AMC’s viewership plunged 73%.
Even the Disney Channel, which has cranked out pop and movie stars for decades, went from 1.96m viewers in 2014 to 132k in 2023 — a 93% drop.
The streaming takeover
At its peak, 100m+ households subscribed to cable. Today, ~70m households subscribe.
The dip makes sense, given that the amount of new, original content on cable has dwindled; the number of original scripted shows has fallen 39% since 2015.
And streaming platforms have become the norm for many viewers. A January survey found that 73% tune in to a streaming service before cable when watching TV — up from 42% a year prior.
Amid all the change…
… some networks have learned to evolve and embrace the streaming wave.
FX’s “The Bear” just won an Emmy and streams on Hulu; Bravo’s shows are a top draw for Peacock’s 31m+ subscribers; and the Hallmark Channel is actually growing, with an average prime-time audience of 929k in 2023, up 12% from 10 years ago.
So, perhaps we are at the perfect intersection in media where you can pay for cable as well as six different streaming services to watch all your shows. Lucky us.
Free Resource
What’s making waves in marketing this year?
The stubbiest run-through: AI, creator partnerships, and cookieless personalization.
But to meaningfully answer the question, we surveyed 1.4k+ global professionals and shared our findings in the State of Marketing Report. It’s fascinating, factual, and free.
What’s top of mind for marketers:
The biggest changes in our faces
The future of content marketing by Search Engine Journal
Holsten’s, the New Jersey ice cream parlor where the iconic final scene of “The Sopranos” was filmed, put the booth that served as a family hangout/crime scene (???) up on eBay. The parlor was expecting a $10k sale price to help fund renovations; a bidding war took the final sale up to $82.6k.
SNIPPETS
Everything was down: Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Messenger; Discord; and YouTube all experienced outages on Tuesday. Meta cited a “technical issue.”
Four former Twitter execs are suing Elon Musk and X Corp. for $128m+ in unpaid severance. The execs claim they were fired without cause and are each owed one year’s salary plus unvested stock.
Speaking of Mr. Musk… Tesla’s Berlin factory lost power following an arson attack on a high-voltage electricity pylon close by, putting the plant and bordering villages in the dark.
Public trust in AI companies is sliding, with an Edelman study showing global faith dipping from 61% five years ago to 53% today. In the US, it’s far worse: only 35% of Americans say they trust AI companies, a 15-point drop from five years prior.
A California man became the first person to be prosecuted for smuggling greenhouse gases into the US. The man, who bought refrigerants in Mexico, allegedly smuggled the contraband across the border in his car and sold them on sites like Facebook Marketplace.
Target is launching a new paid membership, Circle 360, next month. It will offer free same-day delivery for $49 per year.
Wow: Unitree Robotics said its H1 robot can run up to 7.38 mph. That’s ~2 mph faster than Boston Dynamics’ Atlas, but still slower than Usain Bolt, whose average ground speed is ~23.3mph.
That’s fun: NASA’s The Lost Universe is a new tabletop RPG about a group of lost researchers and a missing Hubble Space Telescope. Players can download it for free.
The Dartmouth men’s basketball teamvoted to become the first unionized team in NCAA Division I history, a step that could ultimately lead to all collegiate athletes at private schools being reclassified as employees.
Don't miss this...
A 3x Emmy winner built two million-dollar businesses and pivoted from media to fintech at 50. Check out her winning formula in this week's Trends.
Franc prank
If someone offers to sell you the Eiffel Tower, don’t believe them
Around the time one Charles Ponzi was popularizing phony real estate scams, other con artists were making a killing by selling off historical monuments that they, of course, didn’t own.
George C. Parker peddled the Brooklyn Bridge to multiple unsuspecting investors in the late 19th century.
Arthur Furguson allegedly pawned Big Ben, plus Nelson’s Column, to tourists in the 1920s.
Victor Lustig “sold” the Eiffel Tower multiple times for $70k+ in cash ($1m+ today) in the early 20th century.
Yeah, that last one said multiple times. Lustig became one of history’s most notorious con men with his audacious schemes, like selling the Eiffel Tower — which, again, he somehow managed to do not once, but twice.
There are thousands of companies valued at $1B+. How many clues do you need to identify today’s billion-dollar brand?
Clue 1: This “globally important” financial player has been around the block so long, its articles of incorporation were actually approved by the king of Prussia.
Clue 2: In 1999, archivists digging into this company’s World War II-era financials uncovered loan records about as atrocious as one can imagine. That same year, this company contributed to a $5.2B Holocaust survivors’ compensation fund.
Clue 3: This company’s name originated from its desire to establish that British and French banks were no longer the only game in town.
👇 Scroll to the bottom for the answer 👇
Not Necessary
Aurezzi product line
A wild thing we saw for sale: Do you ever look at your electric toothbrush in utter disgust because it’s made out of stupid plastic? Then DJ Khaled sure has a product for you (no, seriously). The Grammy Award winner is collaborating with Aurezzi on the “world’s first luxury oral care brand,” which includes a 24-karat gold-plated toothbrush and gold-infused toothpaste and mouthwash. A gift box packed with all the gilded necessities will set you back ~$180. But, really, you can’t put a price on your smile. DJ Khalid, who is also a stakeholder in the company, said the brand is the “oral gold standard.” Get it?
AROUND THE WEB
🖥️ On this day: In 2001, Napster began complying with a federal order to stop the transfer of any copyrighted material, signaling the end of the controversial service.
🎧 Podcast: In this episode of Created, Jon interviews “Minecraft” YouTuber Dream about his face reveal, how he gained 30m subscribers faster than MrBeast, and if he’s risking it all by going into music.
Yesterday, we asked you to weigh in on the hotly contested 8am meeting.
And weigh in you did: We got 1.8k+ passionate responses.
But it wasn’t the landslide we were expecting: Only 36% said “hell no” to 8am meetings.
Then there are the 41% who said they’ll give 8am calls a pass for urgent matters, 11% are fine with them, 7% said “eh, I guess,” and a terrifying 5% said they love an 8am chat.
As for what is the right time for a meeting, that was more unanimous:
That winning slot is beloved for being work-life balance friendly: People said it allows them to get kids to school, hit the gym, get caffeinated, and run errands — all while still connecting most time zones.
One reader put it well: “The morning frenzy is behind me, but I’m not quite dead inside yet either.”
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