It depends significantly on how we measure impact, which has always been tricky. As Lizka guessed below, there are multiple ways we can do this, as our impact can consist of influencing the general public (for some of our most viral pieces), “influencers” (journalists, book writers, or anyone with a significant social media presence), teachers, policymakers, etc. These can be very different paths to impact.
Some are pretty easy to measure (the general public can be roughly measured by raw pageviews). In contrast, others are much harder; influence on policymakers can be somewhat measured through mentions in things like government reports, but a lot of it happens behind closed doors (thankfully, we sometimes hear about this too, e.g., someone on our team getting a text message by a friend who works in government, saying our charts were shown in a critical meeting).
If we measure impact purely in terms of media mentions, paper citations, significant re-use, views of our charts, etc., nothing comes even close to our work on COVID-19. Both on our site, but also because it was the underlying data used by many national media on their site, the number of eyeballs on this data was quite crazy, and the rest of our content isn’t within the same order of magnitude.
But overall, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely what has had the most impact. We have a long tail of 3,500 charts, so if one was ever shown to a head of state who made a different decision because of it, that could count as some of our highest direct impact ever – but we might not even be aware of that!
Thanks for the question!
It depends significantly on how we measure impact, which has always been tricky. As Lizka guessed below, there are multiple ways we can do this, as our impact can consist of influencing the general public (for some of our most viral pieces), “influencers” (journalists, book writers, or anyone with a significant social media presence), teachers, policymakers, etc. These can be very different paths to impact.
Some are pretty easy to measure (the general public can be roughly measured by raw pageviews). In contrast, others are much harder; influence on policymakers can be somewhat measured through mentions in things like government reports, but a lot of it happens behind closed doors (thankfully, we sometimes hear about this too, e.g., someone on our team getting a text message by a friend who works in government, saying our charts were shown in a critical meeting).
If we measure impact purely in terms of media mentions, paper citations, significant re-use, views of our charts, etc., nothing comes even close to our work on COVID-19. Both on our site, but also because it was the underlying data used by many national media on their site, the number of eyeballs on this data was quite crazy, and the rest of our content isn’t within the same order of magnitude.
A second way to answer the question would be to examine which of our articles or charts keep popping up in books, learning materials, online conversations, etc. In that regard, I think that Hannah Ritchie’s articles “You want to reduce the carbon footprint of your food? Focus on what you eat, not whether your food is local” and “What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?” are probably the articles that have the highest cumulative impact over time.
If we zoom out, a third way of measuring impact is to ask which of our pieces seem to have shaped other people’s worldviews. In that way, Max Roser’s broader essays such as “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” and “The short history of global living conditions and why it matters that we know it” are strong foundations of our content and a significant fraction of the people who read us have probably come across them.
But overall, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely what has had the most impact. We have a long tail of 3,500 charts, so if one was ever shown to a head of state who made a different decision because of it, that could count as some of our highest direct impact ever – but we might not even be aware of that!