Axis crimes

The truncated axis

A 3% difference, presented as a landslide.

a.k.a. y-axis zoom · non-zero baseline

Bar charts encode value as length, so the baseline has to be zero — chop the bottom off the axis and a bar twice as tall no longer means twice as much. Start the axis at 94 and a one-point gap reads as total domination.

How to spot it

The y-axis starts somewhere suspiciously specific, like 94.6.
The bars look dramatic but the labelled values are nearly identical.
There is no visible axis at all — just bars and vibes.

The fix

Bars start at zero, always. If the interesting action lives in a narrow range, switch to a line or dot plot and label the axis honestly.

In the gallery

Dark navy deck slide, masthead “Format Desk · United States · full year 2025”, headlined “Streaming never did eat the format mix”. A subhead reads “Every format the industry still ships, at wholesale value for 2025. Twelve formats, none of them dropped, all of them on one shared axis — and the whole business fits inside four gridlines.” Twelve gold horizontal bars run against a logarithmic axis labelled 1, 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000, captioned “US wholesale revenue, $ millions (log₁₀)”: Paid Subscriptions (Premium) 5,881.1, Free Streaming 1,789.3, Other Streaming 1,309.0, Vinyl 1,042.9, Paid Subscriptions (Non-Premium) 495.2, Synchronization 407.1, CD 312.4, Download Album 111.0, Download Single 110.8, Other Digital 46.7, Other Physical 25.8 and, in teal at the bottom, Ringtones & Ringbacks 4.16. Because the axis is logarithmic the bars form a gentle staircase rather than a cliff, and a teal callout beside the last one reads “$4.16 million, and still a sixth of the way across”. Three stat cards down the right side read 12 of 12 formats still earning, 6 : 1 longest bar to shortest end to end — “the entire spread of the American music business” — and $11.5B total US recorded-music revenue in 2025. A gold note box headed “The long tail is alive” argues that no single format has run away with the business and that even two million ringtones clear a sixth of the leader’s bar; under it, in small grey type, “Axis: log₁₀, bars measured from a $1M floor.” A footnote credits the RIAA Year-End 2025 Revenue Report and calls the slide a Format Desk demonstration deck.

The truncated axis

How to spot it

The fix

In the gallery

The ringtone comeback that lived on a log axis

The safety envelope that squared a 15-point gap

The head-to-head trial that was really a photo finish

The skyline that skipped its first 500 meters

The greatest game of all time has 96 reviews

The 4.6-point tax hike that looked like a cliff