Tom Wainwright

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67 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 16 Jun

Tom Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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The Intelligence from The Economist · Local, an aesthetic: the deglobalisation of fun · 16 Jun 2026 podcast

There was quite a good study done which tracked all the trending videos on YouTube across a hundred

countries over three years.

And what it found was that of all those hundreds of thousands of videos, three quarters of them trended in only one country.

And the number of videos that trended in every country in the world was four.

So it's incredibly rare, even on a global platform like YouTube, that you have a truly global, truly universal hit.

The key change here really has been the transition from PC and console gaming to mobile gaming, which is now the biggest way in which people around the world play games.

And that change has been accompanied by a kind of diversification of the way in which people play games and and of the titles that people play in different regions.

What we see is that on PC and console there are still a handful of big mega franchises which are popular almost everywhere, things like

What used to be called the FIFA football series, for instance.

But on mobile, things are more diverse.

And I I did a bit of research on this looking at the five largest mobile gaming markets, and I looked at the top ten most played games in each of those countries last year.

And there is no single game that features in the top ten of all five of those countries.

In fact, across those five top tens, you have thirty-four different titles.

So quite a lot of

variation in gaming from region to region.

Again, what we're seeing is that as more people take up gaming, there are audiences big enough in different countries for developers to make it worth their while making games aimed specifically at, for example, Latin Americans or Indians who previously had to put up with the same games that were being made principally for Americans.

Not dead, but certainly weakening in a big way.

I mean, over the years, as you say, a lot of people have been recruited to American ideas and American goals by the soft power of film, of music, and maybe to a lesser extent gaming.

And America's dominance over these industries is definitely in retreat.

We see the share of viewing of television, the share of listening of music and the share of playing of gaming of American

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