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> Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models

> Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models expires with my contract this summer. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere. Sounds like he had some good leverage going into this deal. Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? Regardless, good for him.

JamisonM 4y ago
> Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? It was probably a risk hedge from them.. he would have wanted a lot more for the full enchilada and they didn't know how it would perform in the future. And now his work is not hard to reproduce so it wasn't a bad call. Every political data team I have heard reporting on essentially concedes that whatever they do ends up more-or-less matching 538.. so it is hard to extract surplus value but also easy to hit that mark roughly. I follow the NHL and there are a lot of models, they disagree in certain details but they largely agree and the "winner" at the end of any given season isn't winning by much.. even private data isn't a big boost.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And who knows how much of this Disney really cares about going forward outside of the Nate Silver Brand--and had they had wanted that they'd have kept Nate Silver.
  - JamisonM 4y ago
    Calculating the difference between the 538 brand and the Nate Silver brand at the time of acquisition was probably a bit of a toss-up too. Nate can move on to a substack that generates $2MM a year with 4 staff and be happy while Disney runs 538 at a reasonable margin and be happy and I guess everyone is a winner?
eclipticplane 4y ago
In the meteoric rise of 538, Nate could have easily walked into NYT or any other tech-forward media outlet and negotiated to retain the models. Disney would have lost out then.

JamisonM 4y ago

> Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? It was probably a risk hedge from them.. he would have wanted a lot more for the full enchilada and they didn't know how it would perform in the future. And now his work is not hard to reproduce so it wasn't a bad call. Every political data team I have heard reporting on essentially concedes that whatever they do ends up more-or-less matching 538.. so it is hard to extract surplus value but also easy to hit that mark roughly. I follow the NHL and there are a lot of models, they disagree in certain details but they largely agree and the "winner" at the end of any given season isn't winning by much.. even private data isn't a big boost.

ghaff 4y ago
And who knows how much of this Disney really cares about going forward outside of the Nate Silver Brand--and had they had wanted that they'd have kept Nate Silver.
- JamisonM 4y ago
  Calculating the difference between the 538 brand and the Nate Silver brand at the time of acquisition was probably a bit of a toss-up too. Nate can move on to a substack that generates $2MM a year with 4 staff and be happy while Disney runs 538 at a reasonable margin and be happy and I guess everyone is a winner?

eclipticplane 4y ago

In the meteoric rise of 538, Nate could have easily walked into NYT or any other tech-forward media outlet and negotiated to retain the models. Disney would have lost out then.