Skynews WhatsApp Graphic Fail

Ooops.

With the airwaves and cyberspace pulsing with the ridiculous $19 Billion Facebook purchase of (the delightful) WhatsApp, here’s one of the key graphics from the report on London’s rolling news channel, Sky News.

They use the commonplace frame of a smartphone (you can find several such templates to copy into powerpoint around the web).

They make neat use of the whatsapp logo/icon, as well as trying to avoid the dull pie-chart with a more modern infographic block.

But wait.

…and their maths?

The headline (along with accompanying narration) states that 70% of whatsapp users message on it every day.

Yet the graph shows that nearly 90% do so.

They have a 7 by 5 grid. That makes 35 cells. Only 4 are empty.

31 out of 35 is obviously not the same as seven out of ten.

That would be 24½. That would have been easy to display. And the cutting of a single logo in half may have even added to the image.

This style of data depiction is a winner. Just make sure your maths isn’t Grade F.