🎯 Fall and Rise of The New York Times

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Welcome back to another issue of Trendline! We’ve lots of interesting charts to dive into today! 👇️ 

1) Fall and rise of the NY Times: Internet led digital advertising reshaped the publishing industry, funneling massive ad revenues to giants like Google and Facebook while undermining traditional and online publishers.

Realizing they couldn’t outcompete such aggregators, outlets like The New York Times successfully pivoted to paid subscription-based models, emphasizing high-quality content. In 2024, NY Times made 48% of its revenue from digital subscriptions. Once the most dominant business model, advertising has shrunk to only 20% of overall revenue for the NY Times.

Companies like Netflix and Spotify further solidify the broader internet trend of users directly paying for digital content (video, audio), reducing reliance on ads as well as deterring piracy.

Ultimately, this shift has shaped internet culture, giving publishers a way to monetize content beyond the standard advertising models. While advertising may still continue to stay relevant, paid subscriptions are growing in popularity.

2) SpaceX is the most valuable private company in US: Yahoo Finance has started providing private company data for late stage growth equity companies. Latest releases shows that SpaceX is the most valuable private company in US, valued at $408.3 Billion. Open AI is #2, valued at $172.7 Billion. 

The list is focuses on US companies (e.g. we don’t see companies like Bytedance and Canva (from Australia) mentioned here).

IPO watch: Coreweave is about to go public soon and is reported oversubscribed after the first day.

3) 42% of farmworkers in US are unauthorized immigrants: This proportion has been between 40-50% for most of this decade, with a noticeable drop in recent years.

Definition: A crop farmworker is an agricultural laborer who performs tasks involved in growing and harvesting crops like vegetables, fruits, grains, and nuts, including planting seeds, weeding, irrigating, harvesting, sorting, and packing the produce.

With current US govt’s policies impacting illegal immigration, the US nonfarm payroll figures are likely to drop in coming 1-2 years.  

4) US Households own 3x as much stock compared to UK/Euro Area households: Found this chart fascinating. In 1990, households in Euro, UK and US held roughly a similar proportion (11-12%) of their financial assets in stocks (equities).

In 2024, UK and Euro households hold approx 10% of financial assets in held in stocks - so not much different from 34 years ago.

However, in the US, this proportion has shot up 3x - US households hold roughly 34% of their financial assets are in stocks.

This can at least be partially explained by the outperformance of US stocks compared to UK/EU stocks, esp. post 2008 financial crisis. It also signals a potential opportunity for UK/Euro households to invest more in stocks?

5) High Income Low Energy countries don’t exist: Income growth and electricity consumption is intricately tied together. Richer countries consume more energy per capita compared to poorer countries. As developing countries get richer, electricity consumption per capita is likely to rise. Where this electricity comes from is super critical for the world to meet its carbon emission standards. There is already a growing trend among large countries like India and China to move towards renewables.