U.S. Presidential Election Coverage Drives FiveThirtyEight to Record-Breaking Month in October
By: Caryn Robbins Nov. 18, 2016
FiveThirtyEight broke new records across all metrics during the last month of the U.S. Presidential Election race: According to comScore, in October readers visited the site more than 92 million times, spending a record of 254 million minutes with the content, up more than 11 times YOY.
Additionally, the site attracted nearly 15 million unique visitors and received over 243 million page views, 12 times the amount compared to October 2015, according to comScore. FiveThirtyEight's Election Forecast was the most popular piece of individual content across all of ESPN's web properties for the month of August, September as well as October, according to Adobe internal metrics. During the month, 4.9 million average weekly readers visited the forecast an average of 2.5 times and consumed 5.7 pages of content per visit. In the most uncertain U.S. election in modern history, FiveThirtyEight's model put the probability of a Donald Trump win at 28.4 percent leading into the election - the most conservative of all available models, which were much more confident about Hillary Clinton's chances. Given the complexities of polling, the site's model was built to account for risk and uncertainty. Editor-in-Chief Nate Silver addressed all the factors impacting this year's election results in the following pieces:"Why FiveThirtyEight Gave Trump A Better Chance Than Almost Anyone Else"
FiveThirtyEight, which launched as an ESPN entity in 2014, is a data journalism organization delivering compelling stories across the verticals of politics, economy, science, life and sports. The site was founded by award-winning author and statistician Nate Silver. Since its debut at ESPN, FiveThirtyEight has built a team with a broad set of skills and experiences in order to apply statistical analysis, data visualization, and data-literate reporting to topics in the news and in everyday life.
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