Slate recently took a look at the financials of Sesame Street. Some of the interesting findings in the article include:

• Each Sesame Street episode costs about $630,000 to make
• Sesame Workshop, the creators of Sesame Street, declared revenues of $136.366 million, and expenses of $136.496 million in 2010. This means that Elmo and friends suffered a net loss of around $130,000
• The company also paid $7 million for what it terms “Muppet Acquisition”

To find out what proportion of Sesame Street’s revenue comes from licensing, what one Presidential contender has to say about the show and other fun facts about the beloved children’s TV series, click here.

Source: Slate

How many children does Santa have to deliver presents to every hour? Philip Bump at The Atlantic
decided to find out. He took into account several factors including the global distribution of children and the changing time zones. He assumed that only Christian children get a visit from Santa, and while the Centives staff can assure you that, from personal experience, this just isn’t true, it’s a fascinating analysis all the same. His findings include:

• There are over 500 million Christian children under the age of 14 who Santa needs to deliver presents to.
• That means that Santa has to deliver the presents at an overall rate of about 6,100 a second.
• Assuming that Santa starts at the international date line and then goes west his schedule seems alright until he hits Europe and has to deliver presents to almost 100 million children

To read some of the other conclusions find the full article over here.

Merry Christmas everybody – we hope everyone is having a wonderful holiday season and we want to thank you all for making Centives such an outstanding success.

Source: The Atlantic

Via: Freakonomics

Why was AT&T so desperate to acquire T-Mobile? The Wall Street Journal took a look at how the current generation of smartphones transformed the carrier business model. They note that hardware and software “app” makers have enjoyed the benefits of the rising use of smartphones while carriers have failed to capitalize on the boom. Some of the interesting points from the article include:

• Carriers pay Apple a subsidy of $400 each time an individual opts to purchase an iPhone with a 2 year contract. The rationale behind this is that this subsidy will encourage customers to stay on the network over the long run and purchase more of the carrier’s services.
• The average user paid carriers $46.09 a month this quarter, which is $2 less than last year.
• Text messaging, which in the past has been an extremely profitable source of revenue for carriers, is being threatened by new apps that let smartphone users communicate with each other directly, for free.

To read more about the struggles that carriers face, click here.

Source: Wall Street Journal

In 2005 Congress launched a program that aimed to encourage the use of $1 coins in the United States. The mint was to produce $1 coins until 2016, however the program has failed and the government has decided to shut it down five years before schedule. Some fascinating statistics from the experiment to encourage the adoption of change include:

• The dollar coins are so unpopular that US government vaults are packed with 1.4 billion of those coins.
• There are enough of the coins to meet demand for a decade.
• 40+% of the coins are returned to the treasury because people prefer not to keep the bulky coins.
• The move will save taxpayers $50 million a year.

To read other interesting statistics related to the program click here.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Via: Freakonomics

Glassdoor.com produces an annual “Naughty and Nice” list for technology CEOs. Their most recent list had some interesting BLEHS

• Despite an eventful year where Ballmer acquired Skype, launched the Mango update for Windows Phone, previewed Windows 8, and saw sales of the Xbox reach new highs, his approval ratings fell from 49% to 35%.
• After a disastrous year where Netflix CEO Reed Hastings announced and then retracted several new initiatives such as Qwikster, and ended up sending an email to all Netflix subscribers apologizing for the confusion, his ratings fell from 79% to 61%.
• Facebook, Google and Apple were rated as some of the best places to work in technology.

See GeekWire’s analysis of the report over here.

Source: GeekWire

How can the third richest country in the world (as measured by GDP per Capita) have a butter shortage? That’s the question that the Norwegian people are asking their government upon hearing that their butter supplies are to be rationed. The answer is simple: The Norwegian Dairy Cooperative has a monopoly on the domestic market, and bad weather this year hurt their dairy supplies. The Norwegian government has opted to relax tariffs on butter so that the rationing can be lifted. On the surface this is an important lesson on the value of Free Trade, but, as Slate
notes, there are some valid reasons for Norway to have trade restrictions on goods such as butter.

• Norway is rich due to the discovery of off-shore oil reserves. This is a capital intensive industry that doesn’t employ many people.
• The high value of the exports pushes up the value of the Norwegian currency making imports from abroad extremely cheap.
• These two factors combine to create a problem where no industry aside from the oil industry can survive in Norway. While the Norwegian makes enough revenue from oil to guarantee a high income for the Norwegian people, even if they are unable to find jobs in the oil industry, there is a general deterioration in human capital as Norwegians do not gain any meaningful skills.
• So that the country still has human resources and a future when the oil runs out, Norway protects several of its own industries.

To read more about how the Norwegian government invests its funds to ensure that its currency doesn’t appreciate too much as well as the government’s investments in its future click here.

Source: Slate

Bloomberg asked some economists about how the retail market would fare during November, but consumers did not put in as much money as some were expecting. The median expected gain by the economists was a .6% increase, however sales only went up .2% which was the bottom of the range of their expected outcomes. The article said that though sales in areas of the economy associated with gifts went up, the other areas went down as a sign that many consumers were making a choice on what to spend on rather than just spending more.  The article quoted economist Ryan Wang as saying, “Sales are growing, but they just aren’t accelerating.” Some more numbers from the article are:

• There was a 2.1% increase of sales at electronics stores and a .5 percent increase at clothing stores
• Unemployment fell to 8.6%
• October and September outperformed their growth expectations by .1 and .2%

Cracked had a fascinating article that looked at the bizarre trends that appear to predict economic collapse. They include:

• A surge in mosquitos
• Prettier serving staff
• A rise in dog-napping
• Older Playboy
  bunnies
• Sexual infidelity

To find out why each of those things change along with the strength of the economy, as well as to learn about other factors such as tie colours and the nature of advertisements, click here.

Source: Cracked

The OC Weekly wrote that Ticketmaster has lost a class action lawsuit, Curt Schlesinger et al. v. Ticketmaster. The lawsuit was filed over Ticketmaster’s allegedly over-priced service charges. Ticketmaster will continue to charge service fees but they will have to change the description of these fees. Those who bought from Ticketmaster could receive these refunds:

• A dollar and a half credit on up to 17 tickets bought over the course of October 1999 – October 2011
• A five dollar refund for customers who used the expedited delivery option