People in the US and Canada spent over $53 billion on marijuana in 2016

People in North America spent $53.3 billion on legal, medical, and illicit marijuana in 2016.
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 The North American legal weed market posted $6.7 billion in revenue in 2016, up 30% from the year before. The illicit market generated 87% of total pot sales, down from 90% in 2015.
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Unlike other fast-growing markets, which include organic foods, home video, and mobile, "the cannabis industry doesn't need to create demand for a new product or innovation — it just needs to move demand for an already widely-popular product into legal channels."  
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The  popularity of alternative ingestion methods — such as weed-laced topicals, sprays, and edibles — also fueled growth in the legal market. Consumers who would never smoke a joint are finding relief in other products, which offer a wide array of tastes, strengths, and experiences.
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In Colorado, where cannabis has been fully legal since 2012, these alternatives grew from 30% of total legal sales in the first quarter of 2014 to 45% in the third quarter of 2016.
"It's one of the major reasons that people are going to leave the underground market to go to the aboveground market. It's about variety," Dayton told Business Insider. "You just can't get these products on the underground market."
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-canada-marijuana-spending-legal-illicit-2017-1?r=US&IR=T&IR=T

Mozilla unveils new logo, font, and design

Mozilla today revamped its “brand identity”: a new logo, font, color palette, language architecture, and imagery. This is the first time the company, first founded in February 1998, has done such thorough brand refresh.

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 The biggest change is of course the logo (see the old one here). The biggest standout is the inclusion of “://” in place of “ill” to emphasize the company’s ties to the internet. Mozilla says it is “committed to the original intent of the link as the beginning of an unfiltered, unmediated experience into the rich content of the internet.” Its color palette is derived from the highlight colors used by Firefox and other browsers.

The new font, called Zilla, is free and open to all. It was created by Typotheque, a historic Mozilla partner that was the first type foundry to release web-based fonts.  

http://venturebeat.com/2017/01/18/mozilla-unveils-new-logo-font-and-design 

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Netflix is really bad for DVD sales, according to new research

Having movies available on Netflix is really bad for DVD sales, according to new academic research.
In 2016, subscription streaming video from the likes of Netflix overtook disc sales for the first time, at $6.2 billion to $5.4 billion. Netflix pays billions to licence TV shows and movies, so the rise of subscription video isn’t inherently a bad thing for the movie industry.
But a new academic study, pointed to by TorrentFreak, suggests that having a movie on Netflix can depress DVD sales in a major way.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/netflix-lowers-dvd-sales-research-2017-1

The paperless library

Sep 22nd 2005

The value of knowledge and the return on the public investment in research depends, in part, upon wide distribution and ready access. It is big business. In America, the core scientific publishing market is estimated at between $7 billion and $11 billion. The International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers says that there are more than 2,000 publishers worldwide specialising in these subjects. They publish more than 1.2m articles each year in some 16,000 journals.

http://www.economist.com/node/4423646 

http://publishers.org/sites/default/files/uploads/infographic_scholarly_publishing_process_7.25.2016.pdf 

http://www.stm-assoc.org/ 

Beyond the box

Apr 29th 2010

Television rushes online, only to wonder where the money is.

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Because so many programmes are available at the click of a mouse, people may be less likely to buy boxed sets of their favourite shows. Spending on DVDs in America fell from $20 billion in 2006 to $16 billion in 2009. That was partly because of the recession and the spread of kiosks that rent out DVDs cheaply, but Mr Bewkes of Time Warner says there has been a particularly steep decline in DVD sales of TV shows available free online.
http://www.economist.com/node/15980839

Ahoy there!

Apr 29th 2010

Television piracy gets less attention than film or music piracy, but it is no less widespread.
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When Napster emerged ten years ago, music CDs containing two or three good tracks and a lot of padding were sold in shops for $14.99, and often more outside America. Singles were few and cost almost as much as albums. Compressed digital files such as MP3s were not on offer yet. And music piracy was widely tolerated: even respectable folk had their own sneaky collections of C90 tapes. Dissatisfied customers and a culture of copying created an ideal environment for file-sharing to grow.
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By contrast, television's unit of output is already the size people want it. They like to watch whole episodes of “Desperate Housewives”, not extract the best ten minutes of an episode, as music fans like to extract the best tracks from an album. Much free television can already be watched legally on computers and mobile phones. And TV-watching couch potatoes tend to be lazy. Trawling virus-addled websites in search of programmes seems too much like hard work.
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Unlike music and film, nearly all television is free at the margin: once a household has paid its subscription, it costs nothing to watch another show.
The real threat posed by piracy is not that it threatens television's current business model but that it makes building a new one more difficult.
http://www.economist.com/node/15980829

Facebooks annonsnätverk når nu ut till över en miljard människor

Varje månad tar över en miljard användare del av en annons som levereras av Facebooks annonsnätverk, Facebook Audience Network. Och det verkar vara native-annonserna som ses av flest.
http://www.dagensanalys.se/2017/01/facebooks-annonsnatverk-nar-nu-ut-till-over-en-miljard-manniskor/