Nate Silver documents how ABC News silently deleted ~200,000 person-hours of FiveThirtyEight content, redirecting the archive to ABC’s homepage with no public statement.
Key Takeaways
Disney never attempted to monetize FiveThirtyEight: Silver says requests to enable a paywall were dismissed as “not worth Disney’s bandwidth.”
Roughly 20 stories/week over 10 years at ~20 hours per story equals ~200,000 person-hours of work now gone from the live web.
Internet Archive and pre-Disney NYT archives preserve some content, but the primary domain is dead; link rot studies cite 40-66% attrition over 10 years.
Silver estimates disciplined management could have built 100,000+ paying subscribers, putting FiveThirtyEight in the same range as The Free Press ($150M acquisition).
ESPN/Disney fit was structurally wrong from the start: Silver now calls it chosen poorly, contrasting Bloomberg or NYT as more natural subscription-business homes.
Hacker News Comment Review
The sole comment questions whether Silver’s forecasting errors systematically leaned one direction, citing the 2024 model reportedly stalling on Biden-Trump polling after the debate – a commenter claim, not a point Silver makes in the piece.
