Empty Blocks
Blocks carrying only the coinbase transaction, which is almost always the early chain: 78,800 of them are from 2009 and 2010
Short ranges plot one point per block, about one every ten minutes. Longer ranges plot one point per day, computed from every block in that day. How it is computed depends on the chart: some average, some total the day up, some are a ratio of the day's sums, and each chart says which. Either way a brief spike inside a day is smoothed away.
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About this metric
Definition
A block carrying nothing but the miner's own payment to itself. Every block has that one transaction, the coinbase, so a block with a count of one collected no fees and moved nobody's coins. They are almost extinct: close to 90,000 exist in the whole chain, and almost all of them predate 2011.
How it is measured
Blocks whose transaction count is one, so the coinbase is all there is. This chart does not establish why a miner produced one: a pool can be building on a tip it is still validating, and the data shows the result rather than the reason. 86,656 of them are unattributed, because pool identification depends on coinbase patterns that did not exist in 2009 and 2010, which is also when almost all of them were mined. Modern pools typically include transactions within seconds of receiving a new block.
Measured from my own Bitcoin node. Methodology