Here's your 2024 Garbage Wrapped

Hello dear readers,

Today is the last Garbage Day issue of the 2024. It’s been a huge year for the newsletter and, folks, we are tired. You’ll probably get a few sporadic emails from us between now and January, but we’re pausing our regular schedule to take some much-needed time to recharge. Before we go, though, we want to brag a bit if that’s ok.

After moving from Substack to Beehiiv at the beginning of the year, our audience has grown by about 30%, which is wild. And according to Beehiiv’s year-end metrics, we’re finishing out 2024 with a 44% average open rate, a 20% average clickthrough rate, and about 10.5 million total impressions. Wow! That’s a lot of highly-engaged garbage! Also, apparently, these were our three most-read issues of the year:

1. “MrBeast is getting too old to make content slop”

2. “The CNN, MTV, and Disney of the future”

3. “The 4chan-ification of the web”

It was also a big year for Garbage Day Live. We brought the show literally around the world and it was amazing meeting so many readers irl. And we have something big and crazy planned for Garbage Day Live next year, so stay tuned. (Garbagechella? Garbage Fest?)

And, finally, this year we launched Panic World. A podcast that has grown so fast in its initial run that it’s actually been hard to keep up. We’re now regularly cracking 15,000 downloads a week per each new episode, which is way better than we expected. And we have one last episode dropping on Wednesday before that also goes on a break for the holidays. Don’t worry though, it’ll be coming back with Garbage Day in early January. If you still haven’t checked it out yet, you can click here or search “Panic World” on any podcast app you’re using. And if you’re looking for a good starting point for the show, here are the three biggest episodes of the year:

1. “Are kids’ brains being rotted by screens? (With Michael Hobbes)”

2. “Did Tumblr turn kids trans? (With Vera Drew)”

3. “The rise and (maybe) fall of Mr. Beast (with Ben Brock Johnson & Amory Sivertson)”

Alright, let’s get into the rest of the issue (after a word from our sponsor).

The following is a paid ad. If you’re interested in advertising, email me at [email protected] and let’s talk. Thanks!

Keep Your Private Data Off The Dark Web

Every day, data brokers profit from your sensitive info—phone number, DOB, SSN—selling it to the highest bidder. What happens then? Best case: companies target you with ads. Worst case: scammers and identity thieves breach those brokers, leaving your data vulnerable or on the dark web.

It's time you check out Incogni. It scrubs your personal data from the web, confronting the world’s data brokers on your behalf. And unlike other services, Incogni helps remove your sensitive information from all broker types, including those tricky People Search Sites.

Help protect yourself from identity theft, spam calls, and health insurers raising your rates. Plus, just for Garbage Day readers: Get 58% off Incogni using code DAYDEAL.

Who Won The Internet This Year?

With our monthly Garbage Intelligence reports, we keep tabs on the various fluctuations of every major platform on the web. We like to think that this gives us a bit of an edge over other internet culture outlets 😌 because we have some hard data we can point to, rather than just vibes. And so, to close out the year, we decided to look back at all of our data from 2024 (January 1st to December 1st) and see who was leading the pack across the internet. A Garbage Wrapped if you will.

So here’s who dominated each platform this year. Spoiler: It was a whole bunch of already big accounts and passively popular communities benefiting from a large-scale flattening of what we used to call internet culture.

Twitter/X: Elon Musk — 41.6 million new followers 

Unfortunately, the man who bought and renamed X was its clear winner this year. He's getting millions of new followers each month, though he seems to care less than he once did about whether they're authentic or not. (From what we can tell, most of the growth that happened on X this year was driven by bots and spam.) Musk’s only serious competitors were MrBeast and President-elect Donald Trump, who each surged in 2024, though, only after both of them got Musk’s personal seal of approval. 

Bluesky: @bsky.app — 17.3 million new followers

We stopped tracking Bluesky follower stats about a year ago. There wasn’t enough interest or change on the X competitor to make it feel worthwhile. But that’s all changed since November 5th. Now we’re seeing fierce arguments about moderation and bans, bigger companies trying to copy its popular features, and even people getting fired for their skeets. The platform is still decidedly niche, which explains why the official account is still the most popular. Users still care about what the people in charge have to say. Especially as the young site defines what is acceptable behavior on the platform.

YouTube: MrBeast — 109 million new subscribers (obviously)

No surprises here. Jimmy Donaldson conquered YouTube in every way possible this year, breaking T-Series’ infamous subscribers record, inspiring a whole gaggle of successful imitators, and parlaying the channel’s success into a massive TV deal with Amazon. And when Beast Games premieres on YouTube and Amazon Prime next year, it’ll be a referendum on not just MrBeast but YouTube as a cultural force. In other words, does being king of YouTube actually mean anything?

Reddit: r/Damnthatsinteresting — 273,000 upvotes

There are several reasons why it makes sense that a post to r/Damnthatsinteresting was the top-upvoted thread on Reddit this year. It’s got a real “dudes rock” energy to it. It was about The Olympics, a global event that has, in the last decade, become a sort of campy meme-filled Eurovision-for-the-whole-world internet phenomenon. And it was shared to a massive subreddit, which is really the story here. The Reddit homepage shifted in 2024 to prioritize content from already-popular subreddits, which has made the site more stable in some ways, but a whole lot more boring in many other ways.

TikTok: Leah Halton’s video — 57 million likes

It’s very possible that 2024 is the last full year of TikTok as we know it. And if the US government bans it, what legacy will it leave behind? A major reason that question’s so hard to answer is because of how fractured and individualized everyone’s TikTok experience is thanks to the app’s relentless For You algorithm. Which is why many regular TikTok users may not know Australian model Leah Halton even exists. Or that a short video of her making funny faces to the beat of a song was the subject of a loosely coordinated campaign to unseat TikTok’s current most popular video. Which, for the record, is another woman making funny faces to the beat of a song.

Twitch: Kai Cenat — 721,000 peak concurrent viewers

Spanish esports commentator Ibai Llanos had the year’s single most popular stream for the third straight year, but Kai Cenat was the biggest overall streamer of 2024. His streams were top of Twitch consistently throughout the year. Which is largely because he broadcasts his life continuously for days or weeks, filling them with regular prank wars, drama with other streamers, and celebrity guests like Nicki Minaj and Kevin Hart (whose first appearance led to Cenat’s biggest stream). There was a lot of attention on political streamers like Hasan Piker following the election this year, but, looking at the numbers, Cenat is clearly the future of whatever Twitch is evolving into.

Patreon: Jenny Nicholson — 15,900 new Patrons

YouTuber Jenny Nicholson’s years-long effort to chronicle her visit to the Disneyland Star Wars hotel was finally realized in May. Her YouTube video sparked an impressive amount of conversation, considering the hotel closed last year, and got her over 11,000 Patrons over the next two months. And she wasn’t the only YouTuber that has firmly pivoted away from YouTube ad money to Patreon support this year. And it’ll be interesting to watch how YouTube responds to the ongoing AdSense exodus next year.

Spotify: “Espresso” — 1.6 billion global streams

One of the year’s biggest stories among anyone trying to measure cultural impact was the battle for the song of the summer. In the wake of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour last year, pop girlies took center stage, from Charli XCX to Billie Eilish to Chappell Roan. But Sabrina Carpenter emerged victorious, at least on Spotify, with her hit single “Espresso” beating out more established singers like Lady Gaga and BTS’ Jimin. The question you should now be asking is why it is that what’s popular on Spotify doesn’t seem to feel as popular as it should.

Steam: Counter-Strike 2 — 869,000 average concurrent players

This year saw a range of buzzy PC games, from Palworld to Black Myth: Wukong, but it’s hard to beat the classics. Last year, Valve revamped its foundational multiplayer first-person shooter Counter-Strike into a free-to-play experience, improving crucial elements for both the most casual and most dedicated players. Since then, it has spent most of the year comfortably atop our list of most-played games, though it can’t be compared to more kid-friendly successors like Roblox and Fortnite (which are almost too popular to quantify).

Instagram: Ronaldo — 26.7 million followers

Instagram is probably the closest we have to an app with metrics that reflect mainstream culture. Which is also why it’s incredibly boring lol. Still, it has its own quirks. Every month enormous cultural figures like Ryan Reynolds, MrBeast, and Sabrina Carpenter regularly share the top spots with soccer players. And Ronaldo, who’s had the biggest account on Instagram for years, is the only one who checks off both boxes, especially now that his longtime rival Leo Messi is playing in Miami.

Apps: Instagram — 470.8 million downloads on iOS and Android

We mentioned that Instagram was the closest thing we have left to an index of mainstream culture, and here’s an obvious reason why. Instagram was by far the most-downloaded app on iOS and Android this year, while fifth place went to Threads, its new companion app meant to compete with X. Though, Threads doesn’t seem to have the same cultural impact. And, honestly, the most meaningful takeaway from Instagram’s huge success in 2024 also shines some light on Threads’ alleged “popularity”. There is, simply, nowhere else to go. And as X falls off a cliff, Bluesky struggles to go mainstream, and TikTok faces the chopping block next month, that will only become more true.

Facebook: ActBlue — 2.4 million interactions

We figured that the biggest thing on Facebook this year was going to be that weird Catholic Fundamentalism blog, but, no, it was the ActBlue donation page. Which started surging ahead of November’s election. The question we’ve been trying to answer ever since, though, is what that means in the face of the Harris campaign’s loss. Is it a sign that Facebook is now fully out of step with the American zeitgeist? That the internet actually doesn’t reflect our politics anymore? Or that Vice President Kamala Harris’ fumble was actually even more embarrassing than we initially thought, considering how much support she was getting? What about all of the above?

P.S. here’s a real good post.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***