While historically it might be better known for producing hard-hitting long reads and ground-breaking exposés, the New York Times is currently enjoying a wave of success and boosted earnings thanks to some slightly more fun offerings, with its games and puzzles played over 8 billion times in 2023.
That mind-boggling figure is largely thanks to its star acquisition Wordle, for which it paid just $3 million a little under 2 years ago — the 5-letter-word-guessing game was played some 4.8 billion times last year, as daily players still won’t surrender their streaks on the lexicon-testing hit.
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 —theJapanese pocket-sized virtual pet that launched a thousand cute and needy tech companions, from Nintendogs to fluffy AI robots — is making a minor comeback.
Sherwood News
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.
Game, set, hatch
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.
Latest Stories
Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.
