Esports Killed the Landline
Global Esports Audience vs Landline Subscriptions
As esports viewership exploded, landline subscriptions collapsed in perfect inverse. Every headshot retires another rotary phone. Grandma stopped calling because she is on Twitch now.
“The landline was a casualty of competitive gaming. We did not kill telephony — we just slash-muted it.”
— Dr. Ping Spike, Network Archaeologist
A correlation, not a conclusion
What you are looking at is the trajectory of Global Esports Audience set against Landline Subscriptions. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move inversely tightly enough to produce r ≈ 100% (negative). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.
Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.
Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.
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