How to use Silver Bulletin

We're back to publishing more models and data, in addition to our newsletters. Welcome to Phase III of the site.

The short version: Our women’s college basketball (SBCB) ratings just launched this morning, joining the men’s version of SBCB, which we began publishing last week. And we also launched our Trump approval rating dashboard last week. This post contains more about how to navigate the new models, and what we have planned next.

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Silver Bulletin is an unusual Substack for a couple of reasons. One is our cyclicality around elections and, to a lesser degree, major sporting events. This is nothing new, though: it’s the same phenomenon we experienced at FiveThirtyEight. We just had to get used to the fact that interest in the site might be 10x or even 25x higher than the baseline at certain times.¹

It’s not a bad thing, though. If you run a well-regarded year-round restaurant in a resort town, but the restaurant also hosts a pop-up ice cream stand that becomes virally popular for a few three-day weekends each summer, then really you’re running two businesses. There may be some degree of cross-subsidization — ideally, you’ll want to use the ice cream stand to remind your customers that you have a serious restaurant, too. This certainly can’t hurt, even if the uptake is low because most of your ice cream customers are from out of town. But let’s be honest: there can also be some trade-offs. The experience at the restaurant can suffer during peak ice cream season as your regulars have to fight through throngs of tourists. Then, one day, there’s so much demand that your sous-chef who trained in Tuscany is out there serving scoops of your trademark blueberry crumble.

Now that I’m at Substack, there’s another wrinkle. From the launch of Silver Bulletin through June 26 last year, Silver Bulletin — like most other Substacks — could reasonably be described as an “email newsletter.” It was pretty simple. We’d send you a newsletter a few times a week … and hopefully, you’d read it.

Email delivery has a few disadvantages: you can’t fix typos or factual errors in an email (as longtime readers know, I make plenty of the former). And sometimes, there are charts with an interactive component that look better on the web. But overall, it’s a good trade-off, which is why email newsletters are taking off.² The “push” nature of delivering something into somebody’s inbox means there’s a high floor for readership — and there’s a certain intimacy to email. Plus, having any list of customers with a demonstrated interest in your product is inherently valuable. So valuable that we go to great lengths not to abuse your inbox.³

Still, as was also the case at FiveThirtyEight, who comes to Silver Bulletin and how they use it differs between peak and non-peak periods. In the spirit of the site, let me show you some data on this:

During the election peak from Sept. 1 through Nov. 5 last year, empirically speaking we were mostly not an email newsletter. Instead, the majority of the traffic was direct, meaning that people clicked directly to a nate-silver.net URL — often to the election forecast. We also got much higher search traffic during this period.

For the past few months, it was back to essays, and I hope you found some of them valuable. I hear from enough subscribers to know they’re the central reason that some of you are here. And people went back to mostly reading Silver Bulletin over email. Although overall readership was considerably higher than in the early days of the newsletter — though much lower, certainly, than during the election peak — the proportion of who came from where looks more like the pre-election period.

In some ways, the essays are my pride and joy. They’re the fancy restaurant. But the long-term plan was never for Silver Bulletin to be “just” a newsletter but rather a bundle of essays and models. And now we’re starting to accomplish that. If Phase I of Silver Bulletin was the pre-election period and Phase II was the election peak, we’re now in Phase III, where we have some of both.

On March 6 — that is, last Thursday — we launched our Trump approval rating dashboard. The next day, we began publishing our men’s SBCB college basketball ratings. And today, we launched the women’s basketball version of SBCB. What’s coming next?

• This Sunday night — warning, possibly quite late! — we’ll begin publishing our NCAA Tournament projections for men and then hopefully by Monday or Tuesday morning for women.

• Next up, given recent jitters in the economy, we have designs on publishing the Silver Bulletin Economic Index perpetually, which we previously calculated as part of our election forecast but we think is useful year-round.

• We’ll also probably launch Elon Musk approval ratings to accompany the Trump ones. (So long as he maintains his prominent role in the government, which I’m not sure I’d bet on.)

• The college basketball models will go dormant after April 6, the night of the women’s championship game. But they’ll return next year, hopefully close to the start of the season.

• We’re also hoping to relaunch our NBA and NFL models this fall, and we’re hiring for someone to help facilitate that.

I’m using words like “hopefully” and “probably” because these models are a lot of work to build and maintain. But if I’m being honest, I know from reader behavior that they’re very popular and almost always worth the effort. Without going into too much detail, we see Silver Bulletin readers voting with their clicks.

But the models are very much not intended to be consumed over email. As with the election model, they’re meant to be viewed on the web, both because of all the fancy graphics and because they’re updated nearly every day. We’re going to use the email list sparingly to promote them: we’re not going to send out an email blast telling you to click on our updated SBCB ratings because Old Dominion just beat Utah Tech.

We already see some adjustments in user behavior — direct traffic and search traffic are notably higher over the past week. But we have some mechanics we need to work out, making them easier to catch on the site. For now, you can find everything in the navigation bar at the top, but this could get more complicated by the fall if we have several things going at once.

So, the purpose of this newsletter is partly just to plant a seed in your head that if you’re interested in these models, you should get in the habit of using the respective web versions to view them.

But also to tell you that rather than the ice cream stand analogy, we’re hoping for an experience that feels a little fuller. As a food geek, maybe it’s something more like (my parents’ favorite) Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor or Roscioli in Rome, which are sort of deli counters/grocery stores/restaurants. These are small businesses that are doing a few things at once, but they all feel kind of integrated.

Roscioli in Rome, Italy

We hope that vibe holds for next year’s midterms — that they won’t take over the site to the extent the presidential forecast did. Midterms are generally calmer than presidential years, though next year is a particularly important one if you ask me. The ice-cream-stand model may be harder to avoid in September-November 2028 if we make it that far, but that’s a long way out on the horizon.

In the meantime, we’d like to thank you very much for your patronage, and we hope Silver Bulletin is rounding into something you routinely find valuable.

1. For years, I’ve often had to navigate the question “So, what are you up to now…” from virtually the moment an election ends, even though I’m generally pretty busy throughout the four-year cycle.

2. I have a modest equity stake in Substack.

3. I’ll often get people asking me whether I can promote, say, a podcast appearance over the email list. And I’ll almost always say “no” — instead, I’ll link to it on social media or link to it at the top of a substantive post that’s mostly about other things. Even when it came to promoting my own book, I published just two standalone posts. I can’t promise you I never do this: there will always be a few exceptions per year. But although I have no way to prove this, I just think it’s worth it to create an expectation that when Silver Bulletin sends you an email, it’s worth opening and reading.