Shopping mall foot trafficHours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute
American mall foot traffic going down as YouTube uploads explode upward. The teenager who would have been at the mall in 2007 is, in 2022, filming a video instead. Two graphs of the same teenager allocated differently.
US shopping-mall foot traffic declined steadily across this window as e-commerce grew, anchor-store closures accelerated, and the mall format lost its 1980s-1990s default-leisure status. YouTube uploads per minute grew from a few dozen hours in 2007 to over 500 by 2022 as smartphone cameras turned every pocket into a studio. Two completely unrelated lines on opposite trajectories sharing a window because the same sixteen years moved teenage attention from the food court to the front-facing camera. Same generation, different rooms.
The mall lost what the camera gained. Same teenager, different decade.
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Want to learn more about why correlations like “Shopping mall foot traffic” vs “Hours of video uploaded to YouTube per minute” don't prove causation? Read our guide to statistical thinking.
