Morning Consult conducts an annual survey asking US adults which brands they trust the most.

This year, the bulk of top-trusted brands consisted of food, household, and personal products, such as Lysol, Colgate, and Cheerios — familiar brands people across demographics likely have continuously stocked.

Take, for example, the humble Band-Aid. It just landed its third consecutive year in the top spot.

Band-Aids…

… were invented by Johnson & Johnson cotton buyer Earle Dickson after he observed his wife regularly suffering cuts while cooking. J&J launched the product in 1921.

That first year, Band-Aids were sold as sheets that customers had to cut into strips; it made just ~$3k (~$40k today).

Yet, it eventually took off to become a household staple so ubiquitous that it’s now an example of genericide — when a brand name becomes the term for all similar items.

Today, Band-Aid is owned by J&J subsidiary Kenvue.

Which is interesting…

… because J&J is the subject of tens of thousands of lawsuits from plaintiffs who allege that its talc-based products cause cancer.

That’s reflected in a similar survey published last month, the annual Axios Harris Poll 100,which ranks 100 highly visible brands by how Americans view their reputation.

Here, J&J ranks at 73, placing it below even the much-complained-about Southwest Airlines (61). And TikTok — a brand that Gen Z and millennials trust much more than other generations, per the Morning Consult poll — ranks nearly last at 95, in company with fellow platforms Meta (97) and X (99).

But Band-Aid on its own apparently gives us the warm fuzzies — possibly because: a) we don’t always associate brands with their subsidiaries, and b) it’s an early symbol of comfort thanks to the placebo effect that occurs when a caretaker puts one over a child’s cut.

Stewart Butterfield, Caterina Fake, and Jason Classon founded software company Ludicorp in 2002. Its initial project was “Game Neverending.” Unlike other massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, it allowed players to manipulate and create objects, but there was no way to win and no goal aside from communicating with others.

The game wasn’t particularly popular, but there was one element of it that caught on: the ability to share photos.

While the game shut down, the photo-sharing element became Flickr in 2004. A year later, Yahoo acquired Flickr for $35m. Today, SmugMug owns Flickr, which claims to host “tens of billions of photos.”

Butterfield tried again to create an online multiplayer game with “Glitch” in 2011, but once again, it failed to gain steam. But don’t feel too bad for Butterfield — he went on to cocreate Slack, worth $26.5B.