ABC News Erases FiveThirtyEight Archive, Wiping 200,000 Hours of Work After 2025 Shutdown
Updated
Updated · natesilver.net · May 19
ABC News Erases FiveThirtyEight Archive, Wiping 200,000 Hours of Work After 2025 Shutdown
2 articles · Updated · natesilver.net · May 19
All former FiveThirtyEight pages now redirect to ABC News, effectively removing the Disney-era archive after the site was shut in March 2025.
Nate Silver said the deletion wiped roughly 200,000 person-hours of reporting, graphics and editing, and argued Disney spent a decade neglecting the brand rather than building a viable business.
Silver said Disney rejected internal proposals for a paywall that he estimated could have generated about $5 million a year, leaving FiveThirtyEight a small, unmonetized property inside a much larger company.
Archive copies remain available through the Internet Archive for now, while Silver has rebuilt parts of the old operation at Silver Bulletin, including election products and returning sports models.
The disappearance underscores broader web "link rot"—Pew found nearly 40% of decade-old links broken—while closing off a digital record of one of the most influential data-journalism brands of the 2010s.
Did corporate animosity, not business sense, lead to the erasure of FiveThirtyEight's influential data archive?
Is the death of FiveThirtyEight a warning for the future of specialized journalism inside large corporations?