74,600 views – Are You in the 99%?
Why it worked: A timely question boosted by some luck on StumbleUpon. During the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is approaching its one-year anniversary this September, the We Are 99% Tumblr blew up and everyone, including me, was wondering “Who exactly is in the 1%?”
The best thing to measure would be the sizes of their piles of money (accumulated wealth) rather than the amounts flowing into those piles annually, but that data is not available with much accuracy. The flows (household income) would have to substitute. Ironically, it’s one of the most simple graphics I’ve made that got the most traffic, with help from 24k views on StumbleUpon.
23,900 views – How Much Does it Cost to Travel for a Year?
Why it worked: Work is drudgery for many, we dream about exotic escapes. This graphic taps into the desire for something that seems out of reach — an extended vacation to faraway places — and shows that it’s more feasible to do than it first seemed. 800 likes on Facebook is pretty good, a sign that the content is valuable enough to share with your friends.
22,700 views – Bring Food Education Back (Jamie Oliver)
Why it worked: A good social media team for a good cause. Jamie Oliver and his staff have strong presence across the major social media, bringing solid attention to this campaign to make people healthier by promoting whole foods. 3,000 Tweets and 240 Pins? Holy sassafras!
19,500 views – The Open Data Movement (GOOD Magazine)
Why it worked: Visual.ly promotion. This was published shortly after the Visual.ly launch and was featured on their homepage. That, combined with the quality of the content and appealing color palette, I suspect, was enough to make it stick. The 19.5k view count doesn’t include traffic on GOOD’s website or readership of the graphic when it appeared in their printed “Data Issue.”
11,700 views – NBA Championship Team Age Analysis
Why it worked: Visual.ly promotion and novelty of analysis. Also fueled by the launch of Visual.ly last summer, this was something unique in the market of sports analysis. There are loads of text-heavy blogs and databases featuring analysis of sports statistics, but I didn’t see evidence of anyone else asking this particular question (Are championships correlated with player age?), and certainly no one had ever visualized anything like this.
Honorable Mention: 6,300 views – Debunking the 50% Divorce Rate
Why it (sort of) worked: Personally relevant, emotionally charged topic. Marriage, divorce, sex, and relationships are big concerns for nearly everyone, and yet there is very little in the way of good content and understanding around these issues. In the case of divorce, shallow and unverified statistics are thrown around by “the media” and yield no insight into the fascinating complexity of social trends in marriage and family structure over the decades. This was great material for Pinterest (it did get some pins that aren’t shown below).
I must give huge credit to Visual.ly for creating the first community around infographics and visualization — without their platform and promotion, I wouldn’t have had as large an audience to launch these graphics and see how they fared.