Numlock News: October 30, 2024 • Vending, Tiny Toads, Rubber
By Walt Hickey
I’m doing a talk in my friend and former FiveThirtyEight colleague Andrea Jones-Rooy’s show tonight at Caveat in New York, Defeat Misinformation, it’ll be fun and there’s also a livestream if you want to tune in!
Vender
The vending machine business is an $18.2 billion industry in the U.S., with its 3 million machines typically generating around $525 per month in revenue. There are outliers, though, and as convenience becomes a premium, more and more sophisticated vending machines are coming online and getting rolled out throughout North America, building on success abroad. In the United States and Canada, the hot food vending machine sector is now worth $4.8 billion, and lots of robotics companies are coming up with ways to sling pasta, burgers and even groceries autonomously by vending machine. The fresh food vending segment is projected to hit $8 billion by 2029, which will potentially expand the viable times for a nutritious bite.
Flea Toads
Researchers have just discovered a new species of Brachycephalus, which are adorable tiny toads that live in leaf litter and measure less than 1 centimeter in size in adulthood. The new species, B. dacnis, is the seventh species of flea toad described in its genus, and is now the second-smallest vertebrate described in the world, at 7.55 millimeters in length at adulthood. They don’t even have a tadpole stage — they just emerge from eggs looking like toads. That’s how tiny these guys are.
Rubber
Most of the world’s natural rubber comes from Thailand and Indonesia, which combine for about half the global supply. Indonesia, the second-place producer, has seen output decline 20 percent since 2019, to 2.65 million tonnes produced in 2023. Meanwhile, the West African country of Ivory Coast has seen a boom in rubber plantations, producing 1.55 million tonnes of the stuff last year, up from 815,000 tonnes in 2019 and leapfrogging Vietnam to become the third-largest producer of natural rubber in the world. Lots of that comes from Ivory Coast farmers shifting away from cacao in order to get more stable revenue, as the country stands to benefit from European sustainability regulations that go into effect in 2025.
Games
The latest data from Circana has U.S. total spending on video games declining by 6 percent this September compared to the same period a year ago. Most of that is fueled by declining spending on hardware given the lack of a new console generation to stimulate sales. Still, overall sales of games were down, too, with content spending down 3 percent overall. Of the top five games in September, three were EA Sports games.
Discontent
Six companies — Disney, Comcast, Google, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix and Paramount Global — will account for 51 percent of all spending on content in the world this year, up from 47 percent in 2020. Disney will singlehandedly represent 14 percent of global investment in television and filmed content, spending $35.8 billion, up 27 percent compared to 2023 thanks to their full ownership of Hulu. Overall, $40 billion of the projected $126 billion is unceremoniously getting dumped onto their streaming services.
How Far I’ll Go
A global team of archeologists and paleoecologists tried to find evidence of pre-European voyages from midden heaps in the subantarctic region of the southwest Pacific to find out how far south prehistoric Polynesian seafarers made it. Their new study, published in Archaeology in Oceania, involved re-excavating a site on Enderby Island about 500 kilometers south of New Zealand’s Stewart Island and finding more material — such as bone and charcoal — that could be radiocarbon dated. It determined that the site was probably first occupied in 1250 to 1320 AD, and was sporadically occupied for about 100 years. The place was probably not suitable for long-term habitation — with the nearest landmass to the south being 2,000 kilometers away, and the landmass in question being Antarctica, it’s not like it became a crucial waypoint for those traveling southward — but the dating does show that Enderby is a candidate for the southernmost known viable site of Polynesian habitation.
Manaaki Whenua, Landcare Research
Fox
The average price of a 30-second ad in the World Series ranged from $465,000 to $520,000 each for the first five games, meaning that broadcaster Fox is making $44.3 million in ad sales revenue per broadcast. A Game 7’s ad price would come in at something closer to $625,000 per 30-second spot. Needless to say, the people of broadcaster Fox breathed a sigh of relief last night when the New York Yankees had the decency to not be swept 4-0 in the World Series by the Los Angeles Dodgers and will live to fight another game, keeping those juicy ad rates still on the table. While Fox made something like $177.3 million on the first four games, they’re looking at another $147.8 million in ad money on top of that if the Yankees can leg this out to Game 7.
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Omg. Flea toads. 😍 Yes, that’s me, belly down in the leaves with a magnifying glass.