DEVOURED
Disney erased FiveThirtyEight
Disney has completely deleted the FiveThirtyEight website archive, erasing approximately 200,000 human-hours of work by Nate Silver's data journalism outlet.
What: Nate Silver reports that Disney has deleted the entire FiveThirtyEight website archive, redirecting its URL to ABC News. This move, following Disney's shutdown of the site in March 2025 and Silver's departure in 2023, erased an estimated 200,000 person-hours of data journalism content produced during its 10-year tenure under ESPN/Disney/ABC.
Why it matters: This incident highlights the fragility of digital content under corporate ownership and the often-misaligned incentives between large corporations and niche, high-quality editorial brands, leading to the destruction of valuable public information due to perceived lack of profitability.
Takeaway: If you rely on online content archives, be aware that corporate ownership changes or business decisions can lead to permanent deletion; consider independent archiving or local backups for critical information.
Deep dive
- Nate Silver discovered that Disney, which owned FiveThirtyEight, had deleted the entire website archive, with the URL now redirecting to ABC News.
- This deletion occurred despite Silver leaving the site in 2023 and Disney shutting it down in March 2025.
- Silver estimates that approximately 200,000 person-hours of work (20 stories/week for 10 years, 20 hours/story) were erased.
- The article criticizes Disney's nearly decade-long mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight, stating there was "never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit."
- Silver recounts how he and senior staff "begged Disney to turn on a paywall" but were refused, with a potential $5 million annual revenue stream dismissed as a "rounding error" for Disney's $69 billion business.
- The journey included FiveThirtyEight's origins as a personal blog, its tenure at The New York Times (2010-2013), and the "ill-fated" move to ESPN in 2014, followed by a transfer to ABC News.
- Silver describes constant existential uncertainty, leadership changes (like John Skipper's abrupt departure from ESPN), and editorial challenges, including the "Trump thing" in 2016.
- After his contract ended in 2023, ABC News hired a replacement for the election models, G. Elliott Morris, whom Silver had "a long-running feud" with, and further depreciated the brand by changing its styling and removing sections.
- Silver attempted to reacquire the FiveThirtyEight IP to restore the archive but was told to "get lost" by ABC due to his critical public comments.
- He notes that while the Internet Archive preserves some content, the official site is gone, serving as a cautionary tale about link rot and corporate stewardship of valuable digital assets.
Decoder
- Link rot: The process by which hyperlinks to digital content become invalid or inaccessible over time, often due to content being moved, deleted, or websites going offline.
- IP (Intellectual Property): Creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names and images used in commerce, which are protected by law (e.g., copyrights, trademarks, patents).
Original article
Full article content is not available for inline reading.
Explore all 51 articles in today's digest
Fresh dev news, AI-digested daily. Never miss a trend at devoured.fyi