FiveThirtyEight is well and truly dead · ↗ www.mediaite.com

FiveThirtyEight was a US politics and sports analysis blog founded by Nate Silver in 2008. In 2013, the site was acquired by ESPN and in 2018 it was transferred to sister property ABC News, both owned by Disney. Nate Silver left the site in 2023 amid cost-cutting measures. Two years later, the whole site was killed off.

Today, Disney nuked the FiveThirtyEight’s archives. Everything ever written on the site is gone, with the URLs simply redirecting to the ABC News politics feed. Their data page remains up for now, and while the articles it links to are inaccessible, the dataset links still lead to a working GitHub repository. I assume everyone who knew the password is gone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Disney eventually gets this taken down, too.

Nate Silver reportedly wanted to buy the remaining FiveThirtyEight IP, but Disney preferred to shred it. In his words:

BTW, I approached ABC about buying back the former FiveThirtyEight IP*, and they said they wouldn’t sell at any price because I’d criticized their management of the brand. Costing Disney shareholders $$ b/c of their vindictiveness.

* I own the models but the trademarks, etc.

FiveThirtyEight was a pretty formative website during my education when I was learning about statistics and later survey methodology. I think it was from Nate that I first learned about the famed “MRP” technique (even if Nate has since become more skeptical of it). I learned a ton from the website, even if I always much more into the politics side of it than the sports side.

What a waste.