Portuguese soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo is the highest paid athlete on Instagram, according to a study by analytics company HooperHQ, raking in more than twice what he earns from his contract with Juventus.
The big picture: The power of social media not only highlights soccer’s global reach, but also provides top athletes with another revenue stream in a sport where a single injury can end a career. In 2019, 49 sponsored Instagram posts earned Ronaldo $47.8 million, about $14.7 million more than he's paid by Juventus.
An exposé for New York Times Opinion out in December called "One Nation, Tracked," by Stuart A. Thompson and Charlie Warzel, walks readers through how they mined a data file of 50 billion location pings from the cellphones of 12 million Americans as they moved through several major cities, including D.C., New York, San Francisco and L.A.
Why it matters: Supposedly anonymous data isn't always all that anonymous.
