Wednesday marks the six-month anniversary of Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight launch with ESPN.

As the site mixes statistics, sports, data visualization, and academic research, it’s been a must-read on nearly a daily basis for me.

Here’s my unsolicited and slightly ambiguous view of where things stand:

It’s really, really hard to do what FiveThirtyEight is trying to do and to do it well.

Here’s why:

FiveThirtyEight’s business model is primarily based on advertising, and advertisers generally don’t flock to sites that only spit out content once a week. As a result, Silver and colleagues are forced to put out articles at a frenetic pace. As one example, I estimated that FiveThirtyEight wrote 2.5 articles per day covering the 2014 World Cup, posts which were generally written by only one or two full time writers. That’s an incredible pace.

But here’s the catch; while the judging of a data journalism website should be based on content alone, and…