Super Bowl chicken wings consumed

For eleven years running, as Americans collectively devoured somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 billion chicken wings on Super Bowl Sunday, WeChat was quietly adding monthly active users at a suspiciously sympathetic rate. The correlation stands at 0.9741. Tencent has declined to comment on whether their growth strategy involves monitoring Buffalo sauce futures, but the numbers speak for themselves. One imagines a very senior product manager in Shenzhen refreshing the NFL schedule.

The 2013-2024 period saw both metrics riding long, stable secular growth curves with remarkably few interruptions. WeChat grew from roughly 300 million monthly active users in 2013 to well over 1.3 billion by 2024, driven by smartphone penetration in China and the super-app model's lock-in effects. Super Bowl wing consumption tracked similarly upward as the event became more deeply embedded in American food culture and delivery infrastructure improved, with estimates climbing from around 1.2 billion wings in 2013 to 1.6 billion by the early 2020s. Both are essentially proxies for the same global phenomenon: more people with more disposable income and more screens, doing more of the things their respective cultures have decided are fun.

Growth is the most promiscuous variable in statistics — everything that goes up together looks like a couple. The trick is remembering that the chart has no opinion about causation.