Disney deleted ~200,000 person-hours of FiveThirtyEight content when ABC News redirected the domain, with no public statement or archive plan.
Key Takeaways
All Disney-era FiveThirtyEight content (2014-2023) now redirects to ABC News homepage; Internet Archive is the only remaining access point.
Pew research found ~40% link rot over 10 years; ahrefs found two-thirds attrition after 11 years, making corporate deletion far more permanent than it appears.
Silver begged Disney to launch a paywall for revenue stability and was told it wasn’t worth Disney’s bandwidth to implement.
Disney never treated FiveThirtyEight as a profit center; Silver compares it to an unused gym membership - kept on the books, never developed.
Silver believes FiveThirtyEight could have reached 100,000+ paid subscribers, comparable to The Free Press which sold for $150M.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters broadly agree Disney’s handling was pure neglect, not strategic - no paywall, no monetization attempt, no content preservation plan before deletion.
Leadership transition risk surfaced as a key lesson: new executives routinely kill predecessors’ successful projects, a pattern commenters flagged as underappreciated in B2B and acquisition contexts.
The 2016 election forecast remains a genuine dividing line for audience trust in Silver; commenters split on whether a 30% Trump probability was responsible modeling or a credibility failure.
Notable Comments
@simonw: wonders if the decision maker “doesn’t strike them as bad in the slightest” - a values and mental-model gap, not malice.
@Traster: “There’s no intelligence in there, it’s just random fluctuations” - frames Disney’s behavior as weather, not strategy.
