2021 NYC Mayor Primary Election

In anticipation of this year’s NYC Mayoral primaries (being held today), I’ve put together a diagram of the previous Democratic primary, from 2021.

A Sankey diagram of the 2021 New York City Democratic Mayoral primary election, which used ranked choice voting. In the first round, the top 3 vote recipients were Eric Adams, Maya Wiley and Kathryn Garcia. As candidates were eliminated and their votes flowed to other candidates, Garcia moved up to 2nd place in the 7th round. After Wiley was eliminated, Adams finally exceeded 50% of the remaining active votes. Adams' margin of victory over Garcia was 7,197 votes. The number of Inactive Ballots at the end (with none of the remaining candidates ranked) was 140,202, far exceeding the margin of victory.

Some notes:

  • Only a few labels are shown on the diagram, specifically highlighting the changes between rounds.
  • The original votes for each candidate are in gray; any votes added to a candidate keep the color of the last candidate they ‘belonged’ to.
  • On the diagram’s page, you can click the ‘Edit with Sankeymatic‘ button to import the full diagram into the editor, to see exactly how it is made.

Data: New Microsoft Diagram (Sep 2024 Results)

I’ve added diagrams for Microsoft’s recent quarterly results.

Here is the most recent quarter vs. the same one a year before (using the same scale):

A Sankey diagram summarizing Microsoft's financial results for the quarter ending on 9/30/2024. The main node shows Microsoft's total quarterly Revenue, which was just over $65.5 billion. On the input side, that total is divided into Products and 'Service and other'. The Service revenue ($50.3 billion) was slightly over 3x the Product revenue ($15.2 billion). On the output side, the total Revenue is broken up to show what portion is 'Cost of Revenue' ($20.1 billion) vs Margin ($45.4 billion). More expenses are then subtracted until the bottom line is reached at the diagram's end: Microsoft's Net Income for the quarter was $24.6 billion.
A Sankey diagram summarizing Microsoft's financial results for the quarter ending on 9/30/2023. The main node shows Microsoft's total quarterly Revenue, which was just over $56.5 billion. On the input side, that total is divided into Products and 'Service and other'. The Service revenue ($41 billion) was greater than the Product revenue ($15.5 billion). On the output side, the total Revenue is broken up to show what portion is 'Cost of Revenue' ($16.3 billion) vs Margin ($40.2 billion). More expenses are then subtracted until the bottom line is reached at the diagram's end: Microsoft's Net Income for the quarter was $22.2 billion.

The pictures are quite consistent except for the $10M increase in Service revenue and the corresponding increase in costs.

Visit the Microsoft page for more.

One other note: the buttons I mentioned below which said “use this one as a starting point” are now updated to say “Edit with SankeyMATIC“, like so:

They do the same thing as before, but I think this design gets the point across better – more like the ubiquitous Edit on CodePen buttons you see on web tutorial examples.

Data: New NVIDIA & Apple diagrams

Some new example financial diagrams are posted – the latest quarterly results for NVIDIA and for Apple.

Thumbnail of NVIDIA's Q2 financial results as a Sankey diagram. The blue flow at the bottom right represents the net profit.
NVIDIA 2025 Q2 (ending July 28)
Thumbnail of Apple's Q2 financial results as a Sankey diagram. The blue flow at the bottom right represents the net profit.
Apple 2024 Q3 (ending June 30)

There’s a fun new feature on each of these pages as well:

The top diagram on each page now has a ‘public link‘ that lets you use it as the starting point for a diagram of your own. Just look for this on each page:

Text & a button, saying: 'Want to make your own diagram? You can use this one as a starting point'

Try out the links! You may encounter a new technique, or you may arrive at a better layout than I did. 🙂 Here are all 3: NVIDIA 2025 Q2, Apple 2024 Q3, Apple 2024 Year-to-Date.

Beyond the new make-your-own links, you’ll see some additional changes if you happened to visit those pages before:

  • The Data pages are now reorganized. Rather than having an extensive directory structure, there is now just one page for all of a company’s Quarterly diagrams and (in the case of Apple) another for its Annual ones. This should be rather less work to maintain, so hopefully it’ll be easier to keep them up to date.
  • There is now an index of thumbnails at the top of each page, to help give you a broad overview of recent history before you get into the details. (In data visualization terms, it’s a set of small multiples.)
    • The quarterly results are arranged in rows of 4 so that you can scan up & down to compare the same quarter across different years. This makes it easier to see at a glance, for instance, NVIDIA’s growth over one year’s time:
Thumbnails of diagrams showing NVIDIA's last 6 quarterly reports. Note the growth from Q1 2024 to Q1 2025.
  • The scale which is used for every diagram on a page is now listed at the top.

The next question you might ask is:

Why not use the same scale across all of these pages?

The short answer is, the companies are just too different in size. Considering just NVIDIA and Apple:

  • If you made NVIDIA use Apple’s scale, most of its diagrams would be pretty tiny, making it hard to arrange labels in any readable fashion. (See NVIDIA’s Q1 2024 for an example where the flows are already getting too small to comfortably label, even at the scale I chose.)
  • If you made Apple adopt NVIDIA’s scale, then Apple’s diagrams would be incredibly tall.

That’s why each page is considered independently in terms of which diagram scale will provide good readable diagrams at a reasonable size.

For fun, here’s what NVIDIA’s biggest-ever quarter would look like if it did use the same scale as Apple’s latest quarter (compare to the NVIDIA image above):

Diagram showing NVIDIA's Q2 financial results. The numbers are the same as in the diagram at the start of this post, but this version uses a smaller scale so that it can be compared with the Apple diagram below it. All flows are noticeably smaller in this version of the diagram, since it is using the same scale as the Apple diagram below it.

New: SankeyMATIC has a Patreon!

If you are a regular user of SankeyMATIC and would like to contribute to the continuing improvement of this site, consider joining.

There are 4 tiers of support.

Above the lowest tier, you can get a link back to your own site from the About page.

At the highest tier, you can also have your logo and a link on the home page (which averages over a thousand visitors per day).

For more details, visit patreon.com/sankeymatic

New Sample Diagram: “Journey”

There’s a new Sample Diagram to try out at the top of the Build-a-Diagram page: Journey, which demonstrates how you can produce traceable paths for multiple players across multiple stages by using a specific approach to encoding your data.

It was added in February of this year. The conditions required for this kind of diagram to work are:

  • Each flow maintains a single color from start to end.
  • All flows for a particular player must be listed together.
  • The “Arrange the Diagram” control must be set to “Using the exact input order”.

In the sample diagram, every flow for every player has the same value (1), but that condition isn’t absolutely necessary as long as the other conditions are met.

This diagram style can be used for such things as a ranking chart for team standings in a league (sometimes called a “bump chart”).

This post prompted me to go track down when each of the other sample diagram types was added, for comparison:

New, improved News Page!

This News page is now a proper weblog, no longer a manually-maintained static page.

This means several good things:

It’s easier to update!
Making a new post takes way less effort than it did before, and I plan to take advantage of that to post updates here much more often.

A bunch of history has been filled in.
See the “Archives” section in the sidebar for links to many past posts I have cross-posted from the site’s Mastodon account at vis.social/@SankeyMATIC. (The newest item on this page until a couple of days ago was from late 2022, so there was a lot to fill in.)

There’s an RSS Feed now, to make it easier to follow updates here if you are so inclined.

This section now has a lot of the other benefits of an actual blog – there’s a Search box, and posts can be categorized & tagged, and on and on.

You’ll be seeing more here soon!

New Site Section: Data

I’ve added a new tab to the top menu bar: Data: Interesting Diagrams from the Real World.

The first examples there show financial results for companies over time, with the first (of several) being Apple.

You may have already seen such diagrams presented elsewhere in Sankey form. What’s new here is:

  1. Each diagram is overlaid on the same period’s results from the year before
  2. There’s a slider so you can compare them.

Here’s a static screenshot of one:

A Sankey diagram summarizing Apple's 2023 financial results. The main node shows Apple's 2023 Net Sales figure of 383 billion dollars. On the input side, that figure is subdivided into Products and Services, with the Products node further broken down into individual product lines (iPhone, Wearables, Mac, iPad). On the output side, the Net Sales is broken up to show what portion is Cost of Sales (4B) vs Margin (9B). More stages are shown, subtracting more expenses, until the bottom line is reached at the diagram's bottom right corner: Net Income for 2023 of ,995M
Apple’s 2023 Net Sales diagram

(Note that on the page itself, you’ll also get some highlighting & tooltips when hovering that you can’t see in this image.)

And here’s an animated example showing Apple’s 2024 results and a slider revealing the prior year’s results:

Animation. A sankey diagram describing Apple's Q1 2024 results is shown. A slider bar at the right of the diagram is grabbed by a mouse pointer and is dragged to the left of the diagram, revealing a diagram of Apple's 2023 Q1 results for comparison.

(cross-posted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)

Before & After: Social header image

There have been many changes to SankeyMATIC in the last year.

One quick snapshot of what’s changed can be seen in the updated header image on social media which shows off new examples of what you can do on the site; the old & new images are attached here so you can see some of the differences, especially in how much easier the labels can be to read.

"Before" image from November 2022: Below the title "Sample Diagram Starting Points", three sample sankey diagrams are shown: "Job Search", "Ranked Election", and "Basic Budget". All of the labels on the sample diagrams are the same small size and are hard to read.
November 2022
"After" image from January 2024: Four sample sankey diagrams are presented as though they were printed out and scattered in a pile. The labels on each appear in a variety of readable sizes and positions, including some nodes where the label is centered. The diagrams depict four scenarios: "Job Search", "Financial Results", "Ranked Election" and "Budget".
January 2024

(adapted from vis.social/@SankeyMATIC)