You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the numbers tucked inside the news.
9,549 orders
A dataset released by shopping app Instacart has proven to be a useful way to taxonomize spices. Nearly 800 different spices were purchased at least once on the app, and not all are used in the same way. For instance, garlic powder was ordered 9,549 times in the set, more than any other spice, and 34 percent of the time it was organic garlic powder. Plenty of other spices’ organic variants are ordered more often, but ordered far less frequently. [The Awl]
$200 million
Niantic Inc., which made Pokémon Go and is soon to roll out a similar augmented reality game “Harry Potter: Wizards Unite,” has lined up $200 million in Series B funding. What can this tell us about the mobile game economy? On the one hand, “Pokémon Go” made a billion dollars in seven months. On the other, the previous hot mobile gaming company on the block, Rovio of Angry Birds “fame,” lost a fifth of its market value last week after a miserable earnings report. [The Wall Street Journal]
$400 million
Cost to make and market “Justice League,” a film that recently fell to second place in the domestic box office after its second weekend in theaters, which is not something companies usually spend $400 million to achieve. Globally it’s accumulated $481 million thus far. [The New York Times]
$2.8 billion
Meredith Corp., a magazine publisher, will buy Time Inc. in a $2.8 billion deal backed by $650 million from the investment arm of Koch Industries. Meredith owns Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle, and now also Time, Entertainment Weekly, People, Sports Illustrated, and Fortune. [Variety]
$6.6 billion
Hope you had a good Small Business Saturday and you’ve been able to get the taste of blood out of your mouth since Black Friday. But buckle up, because capitalism’s latest holiday, Cyber Monday, is upon us. Adobe forecasts online spending to be up this year, and forecasts $6.6 billion of spending to happen Monday. [USA Today]
$13 billion
“SpongeBob SquarePants: The Broadway Musical” is about to hit the Great White Way, making a yellow sponge more likely to EGOT than most humans. Here’s a staggering figure: since his premiere in 1999. SquarePants has generated over $13 billion worth of merch sales. [The New York Times]
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