We love graphs that make huge scale business deals easy to digest and understand. This chart is a great example, showing us a timeline of major telecommunications deals and mergers. As we follow the path of the telecom world through the timeline, we see that there was once a wealth of cellphone carrier options. Today, this isn’t the case. We’re down to three major cellphone carrier options. These are: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. We have a visualization of what exactly happened to all these companies that used to be household names.

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One example we can see is the fate of Mint Mobile. A lot of people recognize this name because Hollywood superstar Ryan Reynolds was their spokesperson. T-Mobile made a lucrative deal to acquire Mint in 2023 and luckily for the company, Ryan Reynolds agreed to remain a spokesperson.

Out of all the companies, AT&T is the most successful with the most subscribers. But there is a thing as too much success. Because the competition for telecommunication has shrunk over the past few decades, the US Justice Department has intervened and investigated multiple big deals that may have breached monopoly laws. This happened when AT&T had to abandon their planned merger with T-Mobile. With only two major players left in the market, they would have violated monopoly laws. T-Mobile’s merger with Sprint also came under fire, but was ultimately allowed to go through. Many of these mergers are worth millions and billions, so we think graphs like these showing the trajectory of a whole industry are fascinating!

Data can be the key to exposing injustices in society. These graphs are a strong example of that. They examine the pay gap between men and women ever since the introduction of the Equal Pay Act. This legislation was supposed to eliminate the gap entirely, but we can see from the graphs that even sixty years later, the gap still exists. There has been some improvement. In the 60’s the pay gap was $0.61 to the man’s dollar and we’re now up to $0.84 to a man’s dollar in 2022. Graphs like this make it clear when we still have work to do:

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The Equal Pay Act was introduced to give workers of all kinds more rights. It covered child labor as well as the gender-based wage gap. Following the timeline displayed, we can see that it certainly had an effect on the wage gap, but it didn’t close it entirely, and change came slowly. It’s no coincidence that this came about in the 1960s since previously, it was uncommon for women to work outside the home. When they did, they were limited to roles like nursing, teaching, and secretarial positions. The feminist movement of the 60s helped millions of women enter the workforce, but it was clear right away they wouldn’t be treated the same as their male coworkers. We love how the data presents a detailed picture of this issue. You can see comparisons by the dollar and by yearly salary. In both cases, women consistently lag behind for no discernible reason other than their gender. Using calculations based on all this data, we can predict that if change continues at this rate, the gap won’t close for another few decades. We hope visualizations like this can help inspire faster change!

Although the internet was officially created in 1983, it did not become popular worldwide until the mid ‘90s. During the World Wide Web’s infancy, sites like AOL, GeoCities, Yahoo!, Netscape, and MSN ruled supreme. I have fond memories of using Infoseek and Lycos for research in school! Over time, the way humans interacted with the internet evolved, and with it, the most popular websites. A2Hosting.com has created this simple and striking visualization of the top 10 most-visited websites each year since 1995:

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Here are the top 10 most-visited websites each year in 1995:

And here are the top 10 most-visited websites each year in 2023:

As you can see, the only site that have survived the test of time is Yahoo.com, although it plummeted from 2nd place to 8th place. Why is Yahoo still around? Many people still have Yahoo email accounts, so that explains some of the traffic the website receives. Yahoo is also popular for its robust fantasy sports community. Google has dominated first place for most-visited website since 2006. Do you think Google will ever be replaced as the most popular website on the internet?