Valerie Monaco Revenue and Profit at Amazon Redesign

Revenue and Profit at Amazon - Monday Makeover

Background

This week's Makeover Monday visualization was originally publish in a Vox article, "Amazon’s tiny profits, explained", by Rani Molla. The article focus on the growth strategy that Amazon has utilized to great success. Molla writes, "Amazon intentionally posts low profits because it takes the vast majority of the money it earns and invests it right back into the company so that it will profit all the more in the future."

Dataset and Original Visualization

The original data was published on the Macrotrends website (Amazon's Quarterly Revenue and Amazon Quarterly Profit.) The original visualization was the lead chart in the Vox article.

What does the original visualization hope to convey?

The original visualization conveys how revenue at Amazon has risen quickly but profits have stayed relatively low (although any company with profits in the billions is doing pretty well!)

What works well?

It is clear from the visualization that profit has not had the same pattern of growth over time as revenue. Revenue has been rising quickly and profit has stayed low. Also, overall, the chart is relatively uncluttered.

What could be better?

Here the adage "Less is more" can be aptly applied. The visual aspect that catches and holds my attention is the cyclic revenue pattern. This is really not the point of the chart. The quarterly fluculations in revenue are not revealing anything particularly important when it comes to the comparison of revenue and profit. The use of data at the quartely level also leads to clutter in the x-axis. And it is not possible to get detailed information about both revenue and profit when hovering over a data point.

Goals for the redesign

My goal was to create a chart that was uncluttered and provided the view with complete understanding of the information with just a glance. I sought to examine the impact of aggregating the data at level of year, not quarter. It was my hypothesis that annual data with a trend line could quickly and cleanly convey the information.

The redesign

Design Decisions

Not labelling the trend line. In addition to aggregating the data at the level of year (which was a successful design decision), I also included an dashed line (in light gray) showing the expontential trend line relative to the revenue. I did not label this trend line, in the interest of reducing clutter. I am making an assumption that the audience for an article about business revenue, profit, and reinvestment would likely be at least familiar with the idea of expontential growth. Even if they were not familiar with it, the chart would still (a) convey the important information and (b) convey that the trend line is secondary in importance.

Although I did not label it on the chart, I referred to it in the title for the chart "Exponentially Increasing Revenue and Slowly Increasing Profit at Amazon." In their book, "#Makeover Monday", Andy Kribel and Eva Murray write that the chart title should "very specific [and] clarify what ... [was] analyzed and the conclusions"

Full currency detail for each tick mark on Y-axis. One chart area where I included more detail than the original chart was the y-axis tick mark labels. In the original chart, only the top value of $70B had both the dollar sign and the 'B' signifying billions. I decided to include both the $ and 'B' on every tick mark label. Although this increasing the ink, I believe, in this case, that the immediate understanding of the units is worth the trade-off of more ink.

Two data points in each tooltip. One of the challenges of this chart is that the values in the two line diverge greatly. I decided to put the values for both revenue and profit in each tooltip (with the revenue value always being listed on top). This seemed like a successful solution to keeping the detailed comparison information at hand.

Future Design Enhancements

The original graph provide a bit more detail when profits dipped below zero. With additional time, I might explore it this could be achieved in my redesign, but again the relatively small fluculations in profit were not the main communication goal of the chart.

Online Resources

Two things that I learned about during this redesign were:

Removing the boundary lines for charts (to declutter)

Using a different number format for a measure in the axis and the tooltip

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Revenue and Profit at Amazon - Makeover Monday