

It Makes Sense for Some People to Subscribe to AOL - JacobAldridge
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/it-makes-plenty-of-sense-for-some-people-to-subscribe-to-aol/

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hoopism
I had really high hopes for FiveThirtyEight. I really enjoyed the work of
their roster of writers previously and respect Silver's work in both the
political and sports arena.

All that being said the format has left a lot to be desired. My criticism
unfairly is less about this article (though I found it to look largely like an
ad with very little substance... in fact legitimizing some of the offerings as
being valuable services is somewhat dangerous).

I love the in depth statistical analysis of sports and popular and culture.
It's a really cool space. Pop culture and sports daily blogs also are very
popular. The problem is that producing high quality versions of the former in
the latter format has proven to be a very difficult exercise. The articles
come off as shallow and border on slideshow/buzzfeed/BleacherReport type
content.

I hope they figure it out. But despite the great roster it hasn't cracked my
must reads.

Did I just hijack this?

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cwal37
Since it was promoted as something similar to Grantland under ESPN's umbrella
(semi-autonomous site run by an individual with strong creative control) I
thought it would be able to cherrypick individuals who were not just competent
with data, but also writing. After the first couple months, I kind of gave up.
Even when a piece is interesting, the quality of the writing has been
disappointing.

It also irks me a bit that one of the guiding principles in Nate Silver's
manifesto was that they would not chase the news, but would take their time to
provide different insights than other outlets. Instead, it feels like they're
constantly chasing the story of the day or yesterday.

Finally, a disappointing number of articles feel half-finished. As if one of
their staff writers had an idea, ran with it for a while, then got tired and
stopped at their first set of results. Sometimes I take that as a challenge
and go scrounge up more data to try and pull together what else is going on,
but most of the time I just end up not caring.

They still have a handful of lengthy and interesting pieces, but they're rare
enough that I only check the site maybe once a week. Conversely, I check
Grantland 10+ times a day, because their writers are engaging whether it's
basketball stats or pop culture junk.

~~~
hoopism
Having done some work with sports data in the past (with some pretty "viral"
results) I know that roughly 75% - 90% of the ideas I started with ended up
just not being compelling once I looked at the data.

When the pressure is to get something out every week (or more frequent) then
sometimes you will have to use one of those bad ideas.

We tried to come up with something weekly and it took a TON of time (trial and
error). We ended up abandoning our little blog after moderate success due to
the time demands of getting quality content regularly.

It's kinda funny. I have the exact opposite reaction to Grantland. They take a
tremendous amount of time and effort on long form pieces but lack any
statistical or data compelling pieces. I would rather Grantland do what
FiveThirtyEight does (well written quick hit posts) and FivethirtyEight do
what Grantland does (well researched long form infrequent posts).

It's all backwards.

~~~
cwal37
Wait, what? No statistical data-compelling pieces? You would have to
completely ignore a bunch of articles by Zach Lowe/Kirk Goldsberry
(basketball), Bill Barnwell(football), or Rany/Jonah Keri(baseball, I don't
follow that as much.)

Rany was one of the baseball prospectus guys, and Barnwell ran with football
ousiders, both groups that developed a bunch of the advanced stats used in the
sports now. It's not always the most advanced stuff, but they certainly bring
compelling data to the table (Barnwell in particular), they just don't hit you
over the head with it as it tends to be more embedded in the text rather than
presented in a graph (except Goldsberry, he's a graphical dude by
profession/professorship).

~~~
hoopism
Yeah, you are right. They have done some substantial pieces and may not go as
far as I would like, but certainly are beyond where most sports sites would
venture.

I mostly follow Basketball pretty well. Zach does a great job.

------
balabaster
...and in an ironic twist, people poke fun at the portion of their market who
is just afraid to go online... given the revelations that have come to light
over the past year or so, perhaps the rest of us who aren't afraid, should be.
:P

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tonetheman
The author of the article completely missed the part how many distressed
babies the 2.3 million subscriptions are paying for. This would have made the
article much more interesting.

