14.8 billion dollars is how much Spongebob Squarepants has made since its release in 1999.
15.8 billion dollars is how much Dora the Explorer has made since its release in 2000.

Both Dora & Spongebob were kids shows released by Nickelodeon and the two are by far the biggest franchises, making combined more than all other Nickelodeon franchises combined.

The interesting though is I believe a lot of people would be shocked Dora managed to outperform Spongebob financially and in a slightly shorter period of time.

Reason for that though is I did a poll asking a question that related to kids media franchises three weeks ago and these were the results.

Question: Which franchise will be most popular in 100 years?

Results:

Mickey Mouse-44%
SpongeBob-33%
Dragon Ball-13%
Scooby Doo-8%
Dora the Explorer-1%

Looking at the results, I actually agreed with the winner, but strongly disagreed with people only putting Dora at 1%, mainly due to the character making the second highest amount of money in the last 20 years, coming second to Mickey Mouse.

Seeing this, I wanted to write why Dora has had the success it’s had money wise and looking at multiple factors, it could end up making over 100 billion dollars before 2050.

First up, how it has made 15.8 billion dollars.

Like SpongeBob, over 90% of the franchises revenue is from retail, where Dora has made 15.4 billion in merchandise, to Spongebob at 14.4 billion.

The rest for both franchises is split between the box office and direct to video sales.

TV revenue is not listed for two reasons.

The first being that it’s hard to track down exact numbers on lifetime earnings with a franchise, due to reruns and networks putting show advertising in bulk deals with changing time slots.

The second is TV advertising for kids shows don’t pay particularly well and many major kids franchises only advertise to break even for the show and the goal is make money later in merchandise.

This is due to advertisers on kids shows spending much less, where they don’t have things such as healthcare or finance ads, which make up combined 22% of all TV ads.

Also, retail which is 21% of all TV ads is way lower.

Back to Dora though and the revenue stream, it has for merchandise several advantages over SpongeBob.

The first being target demographics.

Dora is targeted for children ages 2-5.
SpongeBob is 6-12.

That seems small, but there’s actually an advantage to it.

Younger children tend to be a bigger market, where they outgrow clothing every 3-6 months, which slows down by the time a kid turns eight, becoming about once every six months or year.

This gives Dora and edge that for younger children, where they can normally sell more items to parents, due to the demographic being a little younger.

The other advantage is Dora is more female leaning.

One of the highest grossing franchises of all time is Disney Princess at 46 billion, which is Disney categorizing all the princesses they’ve done movies on into one merchandise line.

Nickelodeon also has a merchandise line for girls, but the war chest is smaller, due to them having fewer shows/movies made targeted directly at girls, with most being male leaning or for both genders, such as SpongeBob.

The advantage though for Dora is in retail, that character is one of few franchises for girls Nickelodeon has and they’ve pushed the character to be in every girl section to a store for kids.

Those factors are why it has a slight retail edge to SpongeBob and other franchises.

The second factor and likely the bigger one long term is the Hispanic/Latin population, having a character which is hispanic/Latino and does speak Spanish.

South America has 438 million people.
Up 26% from 2000, when the population was 348 million.

There’s also an expected growth by 2050 of 77.8%, with South America expected to hit a population of 779 million people.

There’s also the hispanic population in the United States.

18.5% of the US is of hispanic origins currently.
60.9 million people.

Up from 12.5% in 2000.
35.3 million people.

By 2050, it’s expected the US will be 29% hispanic.
132.8 million people

Even if Dora isn’t very authentic as a character, Nickelodeon/Paramount has tried to flood the character in retail for largely hispanic markets.

This wont stop and they’ll likely gradually try to modify the character overtime to be more authentic and perhaps speak completely in spanish, to grow appeal.

Now, what was the point to writing this?

The poll interested me, because it was only 1% thought Dora, where I don’t think they saw the bigger picture on both female focused products and the massive growth in the hispanic/Latino market.

Obviously every franchise listed will stay popular for decades to come, but this is an example where I believe people really only factored in what was popular to them, versus the bigger picture.