3 ms·
My husband looked over my shoulder and made the interesting point that it's worth comparing the population of America in 1960 to now: 179,323,175 people in 196
by egypturnash 4y ago
My husband looked over my shoulder and made the interesting point that it's worth comparing the population of America in 1960 to now: 179,323,175 people in 1960 has grown to 331,449,281 in 2020. That's about 180% as many people competing for the same entertainment resources.
(source on those numbers: wikipedia's pages for the 1960/2020 census)
Movies have also kind of stopped being a thing you have to go to the local Temple of the Cinematic Arts to see. You can sit at home and stream everything on a pretty big screen. So their revenue's dropped off a lot, even without the fact that they have to give almost the entire price of the ticket to the film studio and are trying to survive by marking up the popcorn.
- TulliusCicero 4y ago> That's about 180% as many people competing for the same entertainment resources. That makes sense for Disneyland and maybe baseball teams, but less so to explain movie theaters, since they're not supply constrained in the same way.
- hotdogrelish 4y agoInterestingly, in 1960 there were 16 MLB teams that played 154 regular season games for a total of 1232 games that year, compared to 30 MLB teams playing 162 games for 2430 total games (almost double!) a year today. I imagine other sports have seen a similar trend as well.
- bombcar 4y agoThe Houston Texans are the most recent NFL team, but I feel baseball has been more willing to add teams than the NFL has (and baseball games happen almost every day, whereas football is once a week). I've always thought you have baseball team fans and football sport fans; baseball fans want to watch their team, football fans like watching their team but want to watch all the teams, too.