Our 20 top charts of 2010

By The Economist online

A snapshot of our most popular charts from 2010

WHAT makes a popular chart? The theme running through the 20 most viewed daily charts published on this website in 2010 is hard to discern, with charts detailing everything from iPad prices to beer consumption. The most popular, by a distance, showed the ratio of the salary of a country's leader to its GDP per person. (On this measure, India's prime minister is especially poorly rewarded.) The particular appeal of that chart is not entirely clear, though we were rather pleased with the headline. A tree map, a style of chart used on this blog for the first time, indicates the relative popularity of the top 20 charts. Such maps are handy for showing a large number of data values that would visually overcomplicate a pie chart. Colouring can be used to group subsets within the data or, as in this case, to create a heat map. Click on a box to see the corresponding chart.