RN
Ask which celebrities were most popular in a given year and you are asking a question with no answer, because "popular" is not a quantity anyone measures. What gets measured is search volume, or estimated earnings, or streams and sales — three different things that happen to correlate loosely with fame and not at all with each other.
2019 makes an unusually clean demonstration of this, because three well-known organisations published a ranking for it and their results barely overlap.
What Google measured
Google's Year in Search reports trending terms: not the most-searched things, but the ones whose search volume rose most sharply against the previous year. It is a measure of novelty and shock, which is why it is the least useful of the three for identifying fame and the most useful for identifying what happened.
The global top trending searches for 2019 were led by Disney+, then Cameron Boyce, Nipsey Hussle, Hurricane Dorian and Antonio Brown. The trending-people list ran to Antonio Brown, Neymar, James Charles, Jussie Smollett and Kevin Hart.
Look at what that list is made of. A product launch. Two people who died that year — one of them a 20-year-old actor. A hurricane. A contract dispute. A social-media controversy. A legal case. An injury.
None of it is a popularity ranking. Half of it is grief and the other half is news. A person can top this list without a single admirer, and several people on it did.
What Forbes measured
The Celebrity 100 ranks estimated gross pre-tax earnings over a twelve-month window. For 2019 it put Taylor Swift first at an estimated $185 million, Kylie Jenner second at $170 million and Kanye West third at $150 million, followed by Lionel Messi, Ed Sheeran, Cristiano Ronaldo, Neymar, the Eagles, Dr. Phil and Canelo Álvarez. BTS entered the list for the first time at number 43.
Two caveats do most of the work here. These are estimates — Forbes builds them from tour grosses, contract reporting and industry sources, not from anyone's tax return. And gross is not net: an estimate that ignores the manager, the agent, the label, the production costs and the tax bill is not a measure of what anybody kept.
Structurally, the list rewards a very specific set of activities. A stadium tour in the accounting window puts you near the top. So does selling a stake in a company. So does a long-running daytime television contract, which is how a talk-show host outranks nearly every film star alive. Four of the top ten are athletes, which tells you the ranking is not about entertainment either.
What Billboard measured
Billboard's year-end charts count consumption inside one medium. Post Malone was 2019's top artist; the top Hot 100 song of the year was "Old Town Road" by Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus.
This is the most methodologically solid of the three — it counts actual sales, streams and airplay rather than estimating or inferring — and the narrowest. It says nothing about anyone who does not make records.
The overlap
Set the three lists side by side and the top positions have essentially nothing in common. Neymar appears on two of them, for unrelated reasons. Nobody else repeats.
That is not a flaw in any of the three. Each is measuring its own thing accurately. It is a flaw in the question, and it is worth remembering the next time you see any list with "most popular" in the headline: the ranking is downstream of a methodological choice that usually goes unstated, and changing the choice changes the winner.
The version of this list that circulated widely in 2019 — including the one that used to sit at this address — did not choose a methodology at all. It was a set of names someone remembered, padded with rumours about their private lives.
Why an adult site published one
Worth being direct about this, since it is the part the original article was least honest about.
Celebrity roundups appeared on adult sites in that era for a specific reason: enormous search traffic existed around non-consensual intimate images of famous people, and celebrity-name content captured some of it. The 2014 mass leak of stolen private photographs, and the branded archive that grew out of it, sat behind a great deal of that traffic. The old version of this page closed by pointing at exactly that.
That material is a crime against the people in it, and there is no framing under which it is entertainment. It has been the subject of criminal prosecutions, and the argument that it is newsworthy because the subjects are famous has never survived contact with anyone's actual reasoning about consent.
None of which is an argument against celebrity-adjacent adult content as a category. Parody, lookalike and celebrity-themed productions are made by consenting performers who are paid, and the celebrity section covers that. The distinction between the two is not subtle and it is not aesthetic. One set of people agreed to be filmed.
What to take from it
If you actually want to know who mattered in a given year, pick your question first. Who earned most, who was streamed most, who generated the most sudden attention — those are answerable, and the answers are different people.
"Most popular" is not one of them. It is a headline shape, and 2019's three real rankings agreeing on almost nobody is the cleanest proof of that anyone could ask for.