Disney quietly deletes a decade of FiveThirtyEight, redirecting archives to ABC News

Nate Silver reports that ABC News has redirected the entire FiveThirtyEight.com archive to its own homepage, wiping out roughly ten years of work produced under Disney ownership. The site was shuttered in 2025, but until recently most text articles remained accessible. Now they are gone from the live web, surviving only on the Internet Archive and, for pre-2013 content, on The New York Times. Silver estimates the erased output at around 200,000 person-hours across some 10,000 stories.

Silver frames the deletion less as a freak link-rot incident than as the predictable end of a decade of corporate neglect. He argues Disney never seriously tried to monetize FiveThirtyEight, rejecting staff pleas to introduce a paywall on the grounds that the mechanics weren’t worth the company’s attention. He contends the property could plausibly have grown into a subscription business of 100,000-plus paying readers, comparable in scale to The Free Press, had anyone at Disney engaged with it.

The piece also doubles as a reminder of how fragile the web archive really is. Silver cites Pew and Ahrefs studies showing 40 to 67 percent of links rot within roughly a decade, and notes he is rebuilding the most important FiveThirtyEight franchises — election models, polling averages, and sports models — at his subscription newsletter Silver Bulletin.