Hello Kitty = half a billion bucks a year.

CNET News.com.com has a fairly disturbing report on the business of Hello Kitty, which generates about half of Sanrio's $1 billion annual revenue.

At any given time, the silent cat can be found on 22,000 different products worldwide. Every month, 600 new Hello Kitty products come out and 600 others are extinguished. Sanrio makes approximately 6,000 of these itself, but the rest come from licensed manufacturers. (A winery, for instance, has sold a Hello Kitty beaujolais.) Eighty-five percent of Hello Kitty revenue comes from Japan, but Japan's population growth is almost at zero.

So do your part for Hello Kitty world domination and buy the Hello Kitty Toaster (and a dizzying array of other goodies) at Amazon.com.