Top 10 highest-paid celebrities in 2015: Cristiano Ronaldo, Taylor Swift, and...Garth Brooks?

Forbes released its annual 'Celebrity 100' list on Monday, a ranking of the richest celebrities across the globe according to their earnings over the past year. Who's number one?

3. Katy Perry

David J. Phillip/AP/File
Singer Katy Perry performs during halftime of the NFL Super Bowl XLIX football game in Glendale, Ariz. Perry was the highest-paid female celebrity on Forbes' list, taking in $135 million at No. 3.

Pop star Katy Perry nabbed the No. 3 spot on Forbes' list after garnering $135 million over the past year. In October 2013, she released her third album Prism, which included hit songs like "Dark Horse" and "Roar." By January 2015, Ms. Perry had sold 1.5 million copies, making it the No. 5 best-selling album of 2014, according to Nielsen Music. Her song ‘Dark Horse,’ which features rapper Juicy J, was No. 1 in on-demand audio and video streams and was No. 3 for digital song sales. Earlier in June, the song’s music video surpassed 1 billion views on Vevo, making it the second-most-viewed music video in Vevo’s history behind Justin Bieber’s "Baby".

Perry is also in the final stretch of her highly profitable Prismatic Worldwide Tour. The tour started back in May 2015 and will end this September. It also included this year's Super Bowl halftime performance featuring Lenny Kravitz and Missy Elliott. Nearly 119 million people saw the performance on live television, making it the most-watched Super Bowl halftime show in history, according to Variety. Ironically, there were fewer people watching the actual football game than Perry's show: the New England Patriots v. Seattle Seahawks game had 114.4 million viewers.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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