2016 Postmortem

trailmonkee

(2,681 posts) Tue Nov 6, 2012, 05:05 PM Nov 2012

Wow! Nate Silver Accounted For 20 Percent Of NYT’s Web Traffic On Monday

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/nate-silver-accounted-for-20-percent-of-nyts

Nate Silver's polling analysis has been both manna for political junkies and a lightning rod for criticism from conservatives during the 2012 campaign. A new report out Tuesday indicates that it's also been a major driver of the New York Times' web traffic.

According to The New Republic, Silver's blog "FiveThirtyEight" accounted for an eye-popping 20 percent of the Times' online visits on the eve of Election Day — or to put it another way, "one in five visitors to the sixth-most-trafficked U.S. news site took a look at Silver’s blog."

From TNR:

The Times does not release traffic figures, but a spokesperson said yesterday that Silver’s blog provided a significant—and significantly growing, over the past year—percentage ofTimes pageviews. This fall, visits to the Times’ political coverage (including FiveThirtyEight) have increased, both absolutely and as a percentage of site visits. But FiveThirtyEight’s growth is staggering: where earlier this year, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of politics visits included a stop at FiveThirtyEight, last week that figure was 71 percent.

More from TNR:

According to Alexa, a Web information company, “538” is the eighth-most searched-for term that led visitors to the Times last month. And over the previous month, it grew more than any other referral term; other increasingly relevant terms were “nate silver” and “538.com.” Notably, no other Times staffers or brands appear on Alexa's lists of top referral terms or rising referral terms.