🤑 the billion dollar blog.
on the agenda this week: remdesivir, automated cranes, and flying nuclear command centres.
📖 reading time: 3m 28s.
hi there :) happy monday.
i took a little bit of an extended break. it was good for my sanity. it looks like ireland is about to enter another wave of covid-19 restrictions so i’m preparing to mentally hunker down again.
i hope you & your loved ones are keeping safe 🤞.
tag me on instagram or follow me on twitter if you enjoy this week's brain drain.
a special thank you to my paid subscribers: i appreciate the support.
👂 earworm: listen to maths time joy.
📚 word of the week:“asunder”.
into separate parts; in or into pieces.
two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
- the souls of black folk, w.e.b. du bois. 1903
🧠 brain candy:💉 president trump is being treated with remdesivir. while the drug hasn't been approved by the fda, it was authorised for emergency use for treating hospitalised patients with the coronavirus.
🤖 the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed. the future is right now at los angeles beach ports where they use machine learning to guide self-driving trailers and automated cranes.
🍞 the irish supreme court has found that the bread in subway's heated sandwiches has too much sugar in it to meet the legal definition of being bread.
✈️ the boeing e6 mercury — america’s flying nuclear command centre — were in the news after news of the ill health of donald trump, here's why.
🎹 on spotify, if your music ranks highly for a generic search term like "relaxing" or "white noise," you can accumulate enough listens to steadily make hundreds, in some cases thousands, of dollars a month with minimal effort.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:🤑 the billion dollar blog.
in the summer of 2010 emily weiss, a fashion assistant at vogue, had the idea to start her own fashion blog. she bought a used camera, the domain intothegloss.com, and a couple months later the site was live. into the gloss showcased the real-world beauty routines of fashion influencers and celebrities. the blog was an immediate hit and by 2012 it received more than 200,000 visitors per month.
eight years later, what do you think the site is worth? millions? tens of millions? while that would be an insane success for a blog, it’s not even close to the correct answer of $1.2 billion.
from into the gloss emily created glossier, the groundbreaking beauty brand now valued at over $1 billion. that’s the power of an audience.
at first emily’s story seems like an incredible outlier: a billion dollar company born from a blog? how many times has that really happened? more often than you might think.
after digging deeper into the research i found example after example of creators building a traditional audience and then using it as a launching pad for a massive business.
👉 read more via nathan barry.
🗽 small business bankruptcy.
small businesses like gonzalez’s show what’s at stake when big employers keep workers away from office towers. manhattan businesses that use the digital payment system square are earning only 62% of the revenue they earned pre-pandemic, according to the company.
“this is likely a result of a significant drop in the number of commuters coming into the borough,” according to square economist felipe chacon.
by late september, just 15% of the city’s 1.2 million office workers had returned, according to the partnership for new york city.
“retail and real estate will continue to decline in new york until you can reignite the office traffic,” said joseph malfitano, who advised brooks brothers and the parent company of ann taylor in their bankruptcies this year.
many new york city business owners who give up don’t even bother filing for bankruptcy, which can cost as much as $25,000, according to leslie berkoff, a longtime bankruptcy attorney. owners just lock the doors and walk away.
“what’s the point of bankruptcy? nobody’s going to chase you right now,” said berkoff. “a lot of your vendors probably aren’t going to survive either.”
that’s what cheesemonger patrick watson, the owner of stinky bklyn in the cobble hill neighborhood, did when his landlord refused to renegotiate his rent. watson quickly sold off his inventory of imported brie and humboldt fog and donated the remaining staples —cans of tuna, crackers and condiments—to a homeless shelter.
👉 read more via bloomberg.
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