Day 70: “Netflix” Google Trends Heat Map

Today’s Visualization

Title: Google Trends for “Netflix” in 2021

Notes: How did Google searches for “Netflix” fluctuate throughout 2021?

Tools: R, Tableau, Google Sheets

Reflection

For the prompt “tile” from the 30 Day Chart Challenge, I made a heat map using Google Trends data for the search term “Netflix” in 2021. Each row represents a month, and each column represents a day (1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.), creating a nice calendar grid. At first, I had all of the squares the same size, but I wanted to emphasize the “weekend effect” where searches for Netflix increase on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I think adjusting the size based on weekday worked well!

Google Trends makes data collection very easy except if you want daily data for an extended period of time, because if you select more than 5 months, the interest scores represent weeks instead of days. Since the interest scores are calculated only based on the selected time period, 5 month chunks of daily data would have different reference points and wouldn’t be comparable. Therefore, I had to use the gtrendsR package in R to collect both daily data and monthly scores, then normalize the data to represent all of 2021.

I haven’t created a visualization in this format before, so it was fun to experiment. Also, I can’t believe there’s only a month left of the 100 Day Project — the time flew by!

Today’s Recommendation

Netflix vs. Cable Subscriber Growth by Randy Olson

And speaking of Netflix, check out this interesting viz showing subscriber growth over time compared to traditional cable services!

Until tomorrow,
Paige