Nate Silver has become a celebrity due to his electoral projection blog FiveThirtyEight. This was enhanced by his recent TV appearances, including on the The Colbert Report, and represented 20 percent of visitors to nytimes.com and 71 percent among visitors to the politics section.
Other stats for Silver, his book The Signal and The Noise is ranked 15 in terms of sales on Amazon.com; he got $700,000 in an advance for the book. He recently bet Joe Scarborough $1,000 on the outcome of the election, with the proceeds to go to charity (The Times’s public editor chastised him for the bet) and he has over 325,000 Twitter followers.
