Comment by alberto-m
7 hours ago
I am certainly missing a lot of nuance here, but it seems to me Nate Silver managed to have his cake and eat it too. He surely got good money for selling FiveThirtyEight, and now that the buyer has erased the product, Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers since he offers very similar analyses on his personal site. Sure, natesilver.net has less brand recognition than fivethirtyeight.com, but it's still decently well-known and can only go up from here.
I think the nuance is that it is notable historical articles about predictions and discussions of political elections, during a time when politics is quite at the fore-front of many people's minds
He may also finally shake off the comment trolls who piled onto him after 2016, seemingly blaming him for the election results (absurd but people are absurd).
After that election, a certain group would tirelessly work to discredit him any time his election predictions were not entirely one-sided.
It was so funny, he mostly predicted the election correctly, but people confused probabilistic forecasting for sports lines.
It’s possible NS may have signed a contract saying that he cannot engage in elections prediction for X YZ months to same extent that he did with FiveThirtyEight.
He didn’t. He retained the IP of his election forecast models and he publishes the results from them on his newsletter, The Silver Bulletin
That’s a relief!
> Nate can get back a huge chunk of its readers
The downside is this furthers the divide between folks who pay for subscriptions and masses who get shoveled ad-powered slop.
https://electoral-vote.com is still up, running, and showing data. It has always been free and ad free.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral-vote.com
> Electoral-vote.com is a website created by computer scientist Andrew S. Tanenbaum. The site's primary content was originally poll analysis to project election outcomes. Since the 2016 elections, the site also has featured daily commentary on political news stories.
He put up a substantial number of articles for free during the 2024 election, it felt less paywalled than much of the MSM these days.
He puts up a substantial number of articles today for free.