Happy Friday!
This week Netflix reported it has just over a staggering 200 million subscribers worldwide. The streaming service added 8.5 million subs during Q4 of 2020. This remarkable growth was helped by the stay-at-home restrictions imposed by the global pandemic, but also by the success of popular Netflix Originals including Tiger King, Bridgerton, and The Queen’s Gambit.
Also this week, Fornite announced a partnership with 23 global soccer clubs, in order to entice new audiences to the Fortnite world. This means that Fornite players will be able to access custom jerseys from their favourite teams, and participate in soccer tournaments that take place within Fortnite. According the The Verge, these types of cross-promotions will also give Epic new revenue opportunities which may help make up for the game’s absence on the iOS platform.
As further validation of the growing global trend towards shoppable video, YouTube has started to test this functionality on its own platform. While this may become a lucrative longterm opportunity for YouTube, providing and monitoring the usage of commerce tools to all sorts of content creators, at this magnitude of scale, comes with its own set of challenges. At Rerun, we're keen to see how these experiments evolve.
Until next week!
The Year in New Yorker Interactive Storytelling
And Finally... In 2020, The New Yorker took readers into outer space, to the bottom of the ocean, and gave an insight into public health, and the fight for racial justice, all through interactive storytelling.
Using visualization and interactive design, The New Yorker provided readers with an engaging method of consuming stories. Our favorite story is their Coronavirus Chronicle which used a visual presentation to weave together stories from nearly fifty writers and photographers across New York, which gave readers a twenty-four-hour insight into the epicenter of the pandemic.