Nearly half of the US population — 47% — has listened to a podcast in the last month, more than triple the rate it was a decade ago, The Wall Street Journal reports. It’s not a great time to be traditional news media — TV, newspapers — which is suffering from shrinking influence. But it’s certainly a good time if you happen to be hawking the news on TikTok or a podcast.
OpenAI is expected to broadcast a lengthy commercial at Super Bowl LX, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.
Having aired its first-ever paid ad at last year’s Big Game, the ChatGPT maker is set to take another 60-second ad slot during NBC’s broadcast on February 8, according to people familiar with the matter.
If you were a ’90s kid, you might remember the craze around little egg-shaped toys with an 8-bit digital screen, displaying an ambiguous pet-thing that demanded food and attention.
Now, on the brand’s 30th anniversary, the Tamagotchi — the Japanese pocket-sized virtual pet that launched a thousand cute and needy tech companions, from Nintendogs to fluffy AI robots — is making a minor comeback.
Looking at Google Trends data, searches for “tamagotchi” spiked in December in the US, up around 80% from just six months prior, with the most search volume in almost two decades.
While the toys are popular Christmas gifts, with interest volumes often seen ticking up in December each year, the sudden interest might also have something to do with the birthday celebrations that creator and manufacturer Bandai Namco are putting on, including a Tokyo exhibition that opened on Wednesday.
More broadly, modern consumers appear to have a growing obsession with collectibles (see: Labubu mania), as well as a taste for nostalgia (see: the iPod revival, among many other trends).
But, having finally hit 100 million sales in September last year, the brand itself is probably just glad to exist, giving a whole new generation the chance to experience the profound grief of an unexpected Tamagotchi death.
