sake
People Are Googling "Who Is Running for President" Right Up to the End
America, the Great Republic, is holding her elections today. And her voters, you voters, are, uh, still frantically Googling to find out who’s running for President.
That’s a Google Trends chart above, showing how often people in the United States have searched for “who is running for president”. As you can see, it’s spiked heavily in the past month, and again, higher still, in the past WEEK. The election is today, for god’s sake. “Does anyone know who is running for president? I HAVE TO GO VOTE ON IT TODAY.” Et cetera.
Others are taking to Twitter:
So whose running for president this year?
— Austin Moylan (@moylanator41) November 6, 2012
The orignal graphic floating around is even more horrifying, but it demonstrates the search term’s popularity over 8 years, worldwide. Of course traffic is higher in a more digitally integrated world in 2012, and people will search for the term more than in 2008 and 2004. Google’s just bigger now. But still. STILL. Look at the US-only, 12-month chart here. It’s still pretty damn insane. Maybe the Onion has it right. [Atlantic, BGR]
What Square’s Starbucks Deal Might Look Like
Source: https://intelligence.businessinsider.com/welcome
Square announced yesterday that it will handle all of Starbucks’s U.S. credit- and debit-card sales.
According to Yahoo Finance, analyst consensus for the calendar quarters ending September and December are $3.38 and $3.81 billion, respectively. This doesn’t quite align with Starbucks’ fiscal schedule, but we will assume revenue distribution is similar.
Historically, Starbucks generates about 75 percent of its revenue from the Americas. For the sake of simplicity, we’ll also assume Square is handling Starbucks’s Q3 sales even though the system probably won’t be rolled out for a while.
According to SAI’s Owen Thomas, 25 percent of its sales go through its prepaid Starbucks cards. His assumption of 50 percent credit card sales also seems fair to us.
Additionally, Square’s annualized run rate for transaction volume has organically been growing by $1 billion every other month. Square last announced they were handling transactions at a $6 billion-a-year rate in June. If this growth rate continues, Square will handle the annual equivalent of $7 billion this month, $8 billion in October, and $9 billion in December.
Combining the expected Starbucks sales and its organic growth, Square would be handling $28.6 million of payments a day at the end of the year at an annual run rate of $10.4 billion. With a 2.75% take of transactions, it would be generating revenues of $787,000 a day—for an annual revenue run rate of $287 million.
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Dr. Augustine Fou is Digital Consigliere to marketing executives, advising them on digital strategy and Unified Marketing(tm). Dr Fou has over 17 years of in-the-trenches, hands-on experience, which enables him to provide objective, in-depth assessments of their current marketing programs and recommendations for improving business impact and ROI using digital insights. 
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