On a recent tour of the new “Sesame Street” set, Digiday ran into Cookie Monster, a central character of the show for its entire run. As the program prepares to enter its 46th season, the set has been upgraded, along with a few other updates that will be announced later in the year.
“Over the years, lots of changes,” said Cookie Monster, apparently pleased with the new look of his old home.
Not that the formula is broken: A recent study of the public television juggernaut has shown that “Sesame Street” leads to improved early educational outcomes for children across demographics.
But that’s not what’s on Cookie Monster’s mind at the moment. The social media phenomenon — upwards of 37,000 followers on Twitter and nearly 9.5 million Facebook fans — has a message for his fans: “Maybe they can each send me a cookie,” he suggested.
A brief interview threatened to turn contentious, however, when the topic of deleting cookies came up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the furry blue monster came out strongly against the practice. “That tragic!” he said, in disbelief. “The tragedy! You no delete cookies! No, you send cookies to me.”
More in Media
The Rundown: Recapping Digiday’s four onstage interviews during DMexco 2025
The fireside chats touched on a variety of top-of-mind topics for the media and marketing execs in attendance.
Why The Hill credits growing engagement for its social traffic bump
After experiencing a bump in Facebook referral traffic earlier this year, The Hill’s social traffic is continuing to climb in the second half of 2025. Year-over-year between September 2024 and September 2025, The Hill’s overall social traffic increased by 20 percent, according to The Hill deputy managing editor of audience and content strategy Sarakshi Rai, who shared the figure during a talk at this week’s Digiday Publishing Summit in Miami.
Inside Bloomberg Media’s survival guide for the AI era
The business news publisher has yet to sign a content licensing deal with an AI company, but it did recently implement a new AI-powered on-site search engine.