Data sketch: the most pirated Christmas movies

[Len]

It’s the perfect time to sit back and watch a Christmas classic – and Home Alone tops the chart for the most popular holiday film based on illegal downloads



If ever there were a time to rest on the couch and silence your anxious thoughts with a movie, the holiday season is it. But which films are people watching? I drew this data visualization to find out.

Data

These numbers are based on worldwide illegal downloads from 14 to 18 December, 2013 (yep, just five days’ worth of downloads!) The list could well have changed since then, but this Quartz article by Ritchie King was the most recent data I could find.

It comes from CEG TEK International, a now defunct copyright protection company that used software to track downloads from BitTorrent. Unfortunately, CEG TEK only searched for 33 films it decided were Christmas classics.

In first place, with 20,200 downloads, is Home Alone. Home Alone 2 also makes the list, having been illegally downloaded 8,800 times. The first Home Alone movie was released in 1990 and one striking thing about this data set is its time span, from the 1946 classic It’s A Wonderful Life (8,900 downloads) to the 2011 film Arthur Christmas (16,700).

Design

Um, it’s a bar-chart Christmas tree. Because it’s about Christmas, see?

But seriously, some thought has gone into this, I promise! I thought about adding decorations, but thought that could make it confusing for the viewer about whether the data was represented by the bar, the circles (baubles) or the lines (tinsel).

Often, simple is better if you want to avoid being misunderstood.