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Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times
- guan 14y agoThat percentage is probably going to fall in the next few days.
- jonknee 14y agoAlong with the rest of their web traffic.
- trhtrsh 14y agoAnd Mike Bostock, and the rest of the team! I am still sad that fivethirtyeight got swallowed by NYT. fivethirtyeight has a much better reputation in my mind, I would have loved to see it grow into its own powerhouse.
- nthitz 14y agoLooks like most of the graphics on 538 are using <canvas> which makes me think they weren't made with d3. So that's rather curious for me.
- ssharp 14y agoMaybe they would have done better on their own, but I was much happier to see them get swallowed by the NYT rather than a site like the Huffington Post, where the association would lose them much more goodwill. The things that annoy me with the NYT are the monthly article limit that I have to workaround and how painfully slow 538 is on my iPhone.
- FreeKill 14y agoYeah, it's such a terrible limitation too when all you need to do is remove the variable, and it goes back to normal. I wonder how many customers that inconvenience actually gets for the NYT?
- ryanwaggoner 14y agoCan't tell if you're being sarcastic or not... Regardless, they've landed more than 500k digital subscribers in the past 18 months. I'm sure there are a number of things at play here (bundling home delivery and digital, including app subs in these numbers, etc), but that's still pretty impressive. Source: http://paidcontent.org/2012/10/12/investors-like-new-york-times-paywall-progress/ http://paidcontent.org/2012/10/12/investors-like-new-york-ti...
- tea-flow 14y agoI read 538 articles on my iPhone via RSS (Reeder is my preferred app)
- jsm386 14y agoFirst - this is taken from http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times%E2%80%99-biggest-brand# http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times%E... Second (as is clear from source article but, once more): via https://twitter.com/JanetCoats/status/265925450696642561 https://twitter.com/JanetCoats/status/265925450696642561 @fivethirtyeight did not account for 20% of NYT traffic; 20% of visitors to NYT looked at 538. Big difference, my math-challenged friends.
- mattangriffel 14y agoyes, but as @bdbreedlove mentions, "NYT must have some goddamn impressive stickyness for that not to be a very similar number."
- davidkatz 14y agoMany people check out a news site a few times a day, so it's hard to tell. Either way, it's impressive.
- pdog 14y agoThe New Republic is a better source, so I submitted a new discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4751278 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4751278 Mashable, in this instance, is just rushed and plainly false blog-spam. According to them, FiveThirtyEight "accounted for 20% of all visits to the New York Times website," probably implying page views. The original article says 20% of visitors to the New York Times website also visited the FiveThirtyEight blog.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- mattgrice 14y agoAt this rate, Nate Silver will be responsible for 50% of NYT traffic by next week!
- nostrademons 14y agohttp://xkcd.com/605/ http://xkcd.com/605/
- zalew 14y agohttp://xkcd.com/1130/ http://xkcd.com/1130/
- RudySF 14y agoHeh.. I was just reading his blog before coming to HN.
- jpdoctor 14y agoPossibly relevant: http://www.isnatesilverawitch.com/ http://www.isnatesilverawitch.com/
- kapilkale 14y agoTangential: If you believe in Nate Silver, Intrade is underpricing the Barack Obama contract by 20%+. The contract that pays out $10 if Obama wins is currently trading at $6.70 per contract, implying a 67% chance Obama wins vs Nate Silver's 90%+. Unfortunately, Intrade and American gambling regulations don't play nice so they don't accept US transactions. They also won't write you a margin account so you actually need to have funds in their system to execute a trade today. Hard to say which party is inaccurately estimating the outcome, but given the regulatory hurdles around Intrade and the seemingly low volumes, I wouldn't be surprised if they're off.
- gojomo 14y agoThey don't accept US credit-card transactions. You can mail a check or make a bank wire.
- ceejayoz 14y agoI think the point was that neither of those will make it into your account in time to take advantage at this point.
- usaar333 14y agoTrue. Though intrade has been valuing Obama's chances 10+% lower than 538 at least since the first debate.
- kapilkale 14y agoRight- thanks for the correction.
- nostromo 14y agoIntrade is just one such place to bet. See others listed here: http://www.oddschecker.com/specials/politics-and-election/us-presidential-election/winner http://www.oddschecker.com/specials/politics-and-election/us... SkyBet and Ladbrokers for example both have payouts closer to 538's forecast. What is peculiar is that Intrade is the outlier. In a liquid market this shouldn't happen because it allows for risk-free payouts. So something seems a bit odd about Intrade. It's possible the campaigns have caught on to Intrade's impact on the media and will now step in when prices fall to much. </conspiracy>
- jeremymims 14y agoFiveThirtyEight is actually leased by The New York Times. Nate, brand, and all can leave the New York Times in the middle of 2013 once his contract is up. Depending on the election results, I wouldn't be surprised to see him ask for a whole lot more money, jump to a new highest bidder, or go independent again.
- untog 14y agoHe's actually said that he doesn't intend to be doing this again in four years time, but that FiveThirtyEight (the algorithm/brand) may continue without him.
- shawn-butler 14y agoProbably wants to get back to poker.
- brown9-2 14y agoJudging from what he wrote about poker in his book, doesn't seem likely - talked about how much the game has changed and how he couldn't win with his old strategies/style any more. From the book I get the feeling he'd like to use his forecasting skills in something that is a bit more demanding, he chalks up baseball and political forecasts as falling in the 80/20 pareto rule.
- tux1968 14y agoMan he's hated by a lot of the media. Whole diatribes are being written about how it's impossible to boil an election down to numbers on a spreadsheet. It's crazy that these are the same people that ask us to respect their opinions. Not even a basic understanding of mathematical thinking.
- Kylekramer 14y agoAs a counterpoint, there is of lot of knee jerk rejection of any criticism of Nate Silver. A lot of people protray anything that questions Nate Silver's work as rejection of math.
- chez17 14y agoIn the normal mainstream media, I have not seen one critique of his methods.
- omaranto 14y agoI haven't seen that. Can you point me to an example online?
- wtallis 14y agoWell, if you just reject his conclusions without refuting any of his methods, you haven't really made any argument against him. Those rejections are pretty much all rejections of math in favor of wishful thinking. Mere intuition can never be an effective argument against quantitative analysis.
- hyperbovine 14y agoI'm looking at his projected map. I'm looking at the results map. They're the same. Silver 1, pundits 0.
- wpietri 14y agoBy my scoring, it's something like Silver 1, pundits -75. If they had just kept quiet, it would have been easy to treat them as providing a different take. But their eagerness to beat on Silver was overreach. I can only hope that some of them will have to find honest work after this.
- emmelaich 14y agoSlightly off-topic, but I found this was an interesting article on Nate Silver: http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/11/04/tarnished-silver-assessing-the-new-king-of-stats/ http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/11/04/tarnished-silver-assessin...
- devindotcom 14y agoI don't really buy all this. 538 is a great resource and Nate Silver is a smart guy doing interesting things with data, but millions and millions of people were going to hit the NYT for election stuff regardless and 538 is the site's big election brand right now. It's great for him and the times, but not really remarkable.
- SkyMarshal 14y agoThe accuracy of Nate and other quantitative modelers' forecasts depends on the quality and accuracy of the polls they use. Drew Linzer of votamatic.org has written some really good pieces the past few days examining poll accuracy and the potential for "systemic polling failure": http://votamatic.org/can-we-trust-the-polls/ http://votamatic.org/can-we-trust-the-polls/ http://votamatic.org/another-look-at-survey-bias/ http://votamatic.org/another-look-at-survey-bias/ http://votamatic.org/pollsters-may-be-herding/ http://votamatic.org/pollsters-may-be-herding/
- corny 14y agoNate's model accounts for presumed inaccuracy in the polls but it is partly reliant in those polls' historical leanings. I think it would be more correct to say that his model depends on the quantity and consistency of polls.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- brianchu 14y agoAnd now we know why: Nate Silver correctly predicted every state in the presidential election (Electoral College). So much for the pundits who criticized him, Rasmussen's party ID results that supposedly showed Republicans with a commanding lead in Republican party identification, and "UnSkewed" polls.