Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/109714/nate-silver-the-times%E2%80%99-biggest-brand

by joejohnson • 14 years ago

152 43 14 years ago

tnr.com

guan• 14 years ago

That percentage is probably going to fall in the next few days.

jonknee• 14 years ago

Along with the rest of their web traffic.

trhtrsh• 14 years ago

And 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• 14 years ago

Looks 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• 14 years ago

Maybe 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• 14 years ago

Yeah, 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?

tea-flow• 14 years ago

I read 538 articles on my iPhone via RSS (Reeder is my preferred app)

jsm386• 14 years ago

First - this is taken from 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

@fivethirtyeight did not account for 20% of NYT traffic; 20% of visitors to NYT looked at 538. Big difference, my math-challenged friends.

mattangriffel• 14 years ago

yes, but as @bdbreedlove mentions, "NYT must have some goddamn impressive stickyness for that not to be a very similar number."

davidkatz• 14 years ago

Many people check out a news site a few times a day, so it's hard to tell. Either way, it's impressive.

pdog• 14 years ago

The New Republic is a better source, so I submitted a new discussion here: 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.

mattgrice• 14 years ago

At this rate, Nate Silver will be responsible for 50% of NYT traffic by next week!

nostrademons• 14 years ago

http://xkcd.com/605/

zalew• 14 years ago

http://xkcd.com/1130/

RudySF• 14 years ago

Heh.. I was just reading his blog before coming to HN.

jpdoctor• 14 years ago

Possibly relevant: http://www.isnatesilverawitch.com/

kapilkale3• 14 years ago

Tangential: 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• 14 years ago

They don't accept US credit-card transactions. You can mail a check or make a bank wire.

ceejayoz• 14 years ago

I think the point was that neither of those will make it into your account in time to take advantage at this point.

kapilkale3• 14 years ago

Right- thanks for the correction.

nostromo• 14 years ago

Intrade is just one such place to bet. See others listed here: 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>

rms• 14 years ago

It's very clearly true that one or more backers of Romney are manipulating Intrade. This makes buying Obama on Intrade a spectacular deal.

usaar3332• 14 years ago

It isn't entirely liquid. It's a pain to get money into Intrade (esp. for an American).

IEM (http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/quotes/Pres12_quotes.html) and Intrade were up until yesterday off by 10%. Eventually things moved closer, but regulatory hurdles in actually getting money in (+ limits on funding) really hurt arbitrage opportunities.

kapilkale3• 14 years ago

Well, that opportunity closed up fast. Contract now trading at 9.49.

jeremymims• 14 years ago

FiveThirtyEight 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• 14 years ago

He'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• 14 years ago

Probably wants to get back to poker.

tux1968• 14 years ago

Man 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• 14 years ago

As 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• 14 years ago

In the normal mainstream media, I have not seen one critique of his methods.

omaranto• 14 years ago

I haven't seen that. Can you point me to an example online?

wtallis• 14 years ago

Well, 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• 14 years ago

I'm looking at his projected map. I'm looking at the results map. They're the same. Silver 1, pundits 0.

wpietri• 14 years ago

By 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• 14 years ago

Slightly off-topic, but I found this was an interesting article on Nate Silver:

http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/11/04/tarnished-silver-assessin...

devindotcom• 14 years ago

I 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• 14 years ago

The 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/another-look-at-survey-bias/

http://votamatic.org/pollsters-may-be-herding/

corny• 14 years ago

Nate'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.

brianchu• 14 years ago

And 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.

Nate Silver Is a One-Man Traffic Machine for the Times

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