(This article by junkcharts was originally published at Numbers Rule Your World.)
Reader Jordan G. submitted this infographics (via Business Insider) to Junk Charts, my other blog about graphical presentation of data. Graphically, the chart has nothing to commend itself but the most annoying failure is the awful choice of statistics.
Stating the Trivial
Regarding Pandora, the chart tells us 18.7 million hours of streamed music per day (across many millions of computers) is equal to one computer streaming music for more than 2011 years.
What the chart is really saying is that there are more than 18.7 million hours in 2011 years. (If you do the math, there are 17.6 million hours in 2011 years.) This is true whether or not anyone streams music on Pandora.
Making Non-sensical Comparisons
Regarding Netflix, the chart tells us 22 million hours of old TV shows and movies on Netflix in one day is equal to the number of hours of movies watched in theatres in 3 days.
It's unclear why TV viewing is counted on the one hand but not on the other. Besides, movies on Netflix and movies in theaters are more or less disjoint sets despite both being called movie viewing. Someone can create a Venn diagram similar to this user's amusing take on Netflix selection (link):
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Picking inappropriate reference levels is an endemic problem. I cringe every time I hear how many people are dying every day from hunger (or substitute any disease).
So if disease A causes 36500 deaths a year and disease B causes 18250 deaths a year (half as much), disease A causes 100 deaths per day while B causes 50 deaths per day... it's still twice the number of deaths. The only new information added by changing the unit of measurement is the number of days in a year.
A statistic like the proportion of deaths among 15-35 due to hunger would be much more telling.
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