👋 Happy November?! If you’re deciding what to do with your leftover Halloween candy, take inspiration from the Idaho man who broke a world record — for the second time — by sorting 17.6 ounces of Peanut M&M’s by color in 57.78 seconds.
🎧On the pod: Alright, Starbucks. What the hell is going on with you?
NEWS FLASH
Brinker International
🌶️ Chili’s is having its moment: Parent company Brinker International reported a 14% increase in same-store sales and a 6.5% increase in traffic. Behind the surge is a familiar culprit: TikTok. Chili’s Big Smasher burger, $6 margaritas, and Triple Dipper appetizer platters are going viral on social media, driving traffic, particularly as fast-food competitors raise their prices. The Triple Dipper alone now constitutes 11% of Chili’s business, with sales up 70% in the last year — proof that melted cheese can fix anything.
🪙 Big Tech is making a pretty penny — and spending one, too: This week, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft all shared quarterly earnings reports that told a similar story. All three saw YoY profits soar — 34% for Alphabet, 35% for Meta, and 11% for Microsoft — and beat Wall Street’s expectations. However, they’re also all giving investors cold sweats with their spending, largely on AI computing infrastructure: Meta burned $32.4B in Q3, followed by Microsoft’s $20B and Alphabet’s $13.1B.
🍄 First an alarm clock, now a streaming service? Nintendo continues to surprise us, this time with a new music streaming service available on iOS and Android for Nintendo Switch Online subscribers. It includes video game soundtracks, curated playlists, and the ability to vibe to your favorite themes for up to an hour.
MORE NEWS TO KNOW
Uhh… Russia fined Google a cartoonishly obscene amount — $20 decillion — for taking down government-run YouTube channels after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. That’s 35 figures (and more than the entire world’s GDP), BTW.
Threads, the app billed as Meta’s answer to X, now has ~275m monthly users, and is signing up 1m+ each day, per Mark Zuckerberg. That’s still less than X’s ~318m monthly users, though X’s user base has dropped 24% since October 2022.
What OpenAI hopes you see today: It launched its AI search engine to challenge Google’s supremacy. It’s likely less enthused by this: OpenAI’s internal study shows that AI models fail to answer factual questions more often than they succeed.
GET DISCOVERED
Search isn’t dead — and neither is your future side gig as SEO strategy specialist.
But to professionally survive in an age where AI rules the world, it’s best you get in early. Take this AI SEO toolkit to enhance your standing on search engines and get in front of relevant eyeballs.
The future of TV continues to look like the old days of TV
The death of cable TV has been slow and agonizing, but as the patient bleeds out on the operating table, both consumers and media companies have batted around an intriguing idea:
What if we just did cable TV again?
Wow, what an idea
That was the dream of Venu (as in “venue,” not “Venus”), a Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery alliance that combined all of their sports broadcast rights into one monster streaming service that would function like a cable subscription.
A judge temporarily halted it after a lawsuit from Fubo, a sports-focused streaming service that already does that same basic thing.
But Disney still offers a bundle that gives you its Disney+ and Hulu services along with WBD’s Max, and Comcast offers a Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV+ bundle.
You may recognize this as the cable TV model, where you pay one price to get several channels.
So, what’s the latest regression?
Now, Comcast might be looking to offload its old TV networks (like MSNBC, CNBC, Bravo, USA, and Syfy, but not NBC or its Peacock offshoot) so it can focus on streaming.
It would create a new company focused on cable, which is what company president Mike Cavanagh implied their shareholders want.
By freeing cable up to take care of itself, Comcast could restore some life to the old pay-TV model.
There’s a catch:
The new company would be “well-capitalized,” meaning private equity would likely be involved.
The Hollywood Reporterpredicts that the future of cable networks resembles what happened to newspapers: VCs got involved, squeezed them dry, and they died.
Meanwhile…
… this seems to be exactly what consumers want?
In 2022, Nielsen reported that 64% of streaming subscribers wished they could just pay one bill to get everything.
Again: That’s how cable worked before it faded into cord-cutting obscurity, so maybe consumers don’t really know what they want.
Copyright laws for AI content have been a hot topic, and for good reason — it can be confusing who actually owns it. Lucky for you, we’ve gathered expert tips for all your marketing imagery needs.
You know what a robot can’t steal? Your personality (yet). That’s why learning to create personality-led content could help you stand out in a sea of AI-generated media.
NEWSWORTHY NUMBER
Share of new Google code that’s generated by AI, per CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai said engineers still review and accept the code, and that it helps them “do more and move faster.” If his “more than a quarter” projection sounds like a lot, well, it is; it also indicates how all-in on AI parent company Alphabet is — if you somehow missed the slew of AI additions to its products this year. Yet using AI to code is not exclusive to Google; a 2023 GitHub survey found that 92% of US developers reported already using AI tools.
AROUND THE WEB
✈️ On this day: In 1923, Finnair — then called Aero — was founded using a German-made Junkers F13 seaplane, as Finland had no commercial airfields on land at the time.
📳 That’s interesting: The Icelandic hotels that offer an aurora borealis wake-up call.
✨ That’s cool: NASA’s photo of the young star cluster NGC 602 is stunning.
