By Walt Hickey

I’m on a fun creator panel at Tech Week in New York on Wednesday, if you’re around it should be very neat!

Lifetime

In the mid-2000s, Rolling Stone magazine began to offer a $99 lifetime subscription to their magazine, which was a great deal for people who saw themselves reading the magazine for a while given that an annual subscription was in the ballpark of $20 a year. The “lifetime” subscription would run through 2059 — that is, until this past May, when the people who bought into a lifetime subscription were unceremoniously informed that their deal was ending, and while they’d get their digital editions, no longer were they getting the actual magazine anymore. This has obviously ticked off their most devoted readers. Today, a print and digital subscription goes for $120.

Scott Nover, Slate

Audiobooks

Audiobooks saw sales increase 9 percent in 2023 to $2 billion, a boom time for the format that saw 38 percent of adults listen to an audiobook last year. Audiobooks — a medium that I essentially consider “subject-matter podcast miniseries that actually manage to stick the landing rather than meandering around an inconclusive finale” — are growing fastest in the history/biography/memoir genre, up 22 percent year over year, followed by health and fitness (20 percent growth), religion (17 percent growth) and romance (14 percent growth).

Ed Nawotka, Publishers Weekly

Dog Tax

Two companies that had to surrender over 4,000 mistreated beagles last year pleaded guilty to pollution and violations of the Animal Welfare Act, and will pay the largest-ever fine for the violation of that law. All told, the companies — Envigo RMS LLC and Envigo Global Services Inc. — will pay $35 million in fines and other costs.

Michael Doyle, E&E News

“Nonmenthol”

Regulators in California and Massachusetts banned menthol in cigarettes in 2020 in an attempt to cut back on youth smoking and eliminate a chemical that can make otherwise abrasive tobacco taste somewhat better for new smokers. It didn’t work, as companies simply swapped out menthol with one synthetic chemical, WS-3, that has an identical effect and similar base structure to menthol. In order to get the hoped-for impact, states would instead need to ban any chemical that activates the TRPM8 receptor, which is what menthol and other similar compounds do, an approach already undergone by Canada and the EU.

Julie B. Zimmerman, Hanno C. Erythropel, Tobias D. Muellers, Predrag V. Petrovic, Stephanie S. O’Malley, Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, Sairam V. Jabba, Sven E. Jordt and Paul T. Anastas, Scientific American

Webtoon

Webtoon Entertainment is going public, with the parent company of the Wattpad and Webtoon online creator platforms filing a prospectus with the SEC and planning to list on the Nasdaq. In 2023, the company made $1.28 billion in revenue, up 18.8 percent year over year, most of which came from its paid content business but $108.3 million of which came from book, game, film and television adaptations of its intellectual property. The Webtoon service saw 170 million monthly active users in the first quarter of 2024, and the top 100 creators on the platform average $1 million per year. Webtoon alone is home to 750,000 web comic and web novel titles.

Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly

Shrinking Web

According to data from Similarweb, lots of the largest sites on the internet have seen significantly declining web and mobile traffic since 2021, a troubling finding that has sent some of the largest companies on quests to shore up their revenue from other sources. Facebook traffic is down 27.7 percent over the past three years, according to the company, while Twitch traffic is down 17.5 percent, Wikipedia traffic is down 24.8 percent, and even Google traffic is down 5.3 percent.

Ed Zitron, Sherwood News

Orange You Sad

Brazil is the leading producer and exporter of oranges, and a research association in the country is warning that crop production is going to decline sharply over the coming years owing to disease, pests and bad weather. Orange crop production in Brazil is projected to decline 25 percent from 2024 to 2025, with this season forecasted to produce 233 million boxes of oranges, down from 307 million boxes last year, which should that come to pass would be the second-smallest harvest on record. In May, the USDA projected a similar situation for the American orange crop, with Florida expected to produce a 5 percent smaller harvest.

Francisco Velasquez, Quartz

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