Facebook Ownership

Another interesting piece of data that I stumbled upon is on the ownership on Facebook on http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-facebook-ownership-2011-12 .

I find that not only that there is a small error in the data, but the use of pie chart spoils its purpose.

Here is the image.

Now here are the confusions in this Viz.,

• Use of colors are inappropriate. The smaller sectors are hard to differentiate leading to loss of understanding of data.
• Hard to compare between who is larger owner just by seeing the pie chart.
• Colors in the legend is hard to see and correlate with the chart.
• The sectors also do not provide enough data via proportion for analysis.

Now apart from all this, there is a small error in the data. We see that both Goldman Sachs' Clients and Perter Thiel/Clarium Capital are accounted for $3 billion , but the quantifiable percentages being 3% and 4% respectively. This might have arose because of approximating to the nearest number, but should have done appropriately.

What I would have done differently is plot this on a simple bar chart, like I tried here. [Click on it for a larger view]

You can see that the data appears in a more clear format now. There error in data still persists though, since my whole intention was to provide a better visualization. 

Here in this chart we can clearly see who owns what percentage of the company and how much amount is involved. We can also correspond the details along with the owners name, unlike in a pie chart where we have to map each sector and color to the name.

For the accurate data on the ownership of Facebook, please visit http://whoownsfacebook.com/

I have used Tableau software to create this visualization, it can be downloaded from http://www.tableausoftware.com/ .