‘So Much Hard Work Erased’: Nate Silver Vents Disney Told Him to ‘Get Lost’ Before Deleting FiveThirtyEight’s Archive

(Photo Credit: Big Think on YouTube)

Nate Silver eulogized his old website FiveThirtyEight in a lengthy blog post on Tuesday and lamented there was “so much hard work erased” when Disney recently decided to wipe the political data outlet’s entire archive.

How much hard work? Silver calculated 200,000 hours, or about 23 years of combined work.

“During the Disney era, which lasted about 10 years, FiveThirtyEight published about 20 stories a week. Let’s say that each story took about 20 hours to produce between research, writing, graphics, and editing,” Silver explained. “Do the math, and that works out to about 200,000 person-hours of work that ABC News just deleted.”

That was part of Silver’s massive 4,900-word breakdown of the website’s complicated history on his Silver Bulletin Substack account.

Silver went through the website’s history and outlined both his beefs with Disney and ABC, as well as some mistakes he said he made as well. He also expanded on Disney’s decision to erase FiveThirtyEight’s entire web history, which Silver said last week was a move made by a “bunch of a**holes.” 

Before deleting the site’s history, Silver said he approached Disney “a year or two ago” about buying the archive.

“I’m probably the logical high bidder, though the value is rapidly depreciating as what’s left of the site falls into disrepair. At a minimum, we’d restore the archive, with prominent links to Silver Bulletin,” Silver explained.

That plan was shot down, though.

“We were told to basically get lost: ABC was annoyed with my critical public comments about their management of FiveThirtyEight,” Silver explained.

He wrote that Disney was a poor parent company that did little to help the site succeed after buying it for an undisclosed sum in 2013.

“The thinking at Disney is presumably that they invested a lot of money in FiveThirtyEight and were left with nothing to show for it. But to my mind, however much they spent on FiveThirtyEight, they never invested a dollar in it,” Silver said. “There was never really any effort, or even any pretense of trying, to make it a profitable unit of the company.”

Silver said he “basically begged” Disney to turn on a paywall at one point, and said it felt like the site was being “treated like an unused gym membership: you don’t want to cancel because you think you ought to be hitting the gym, but every month a charge hits your credit card statement and you aren’t getting any fitter.”

He also rattled off several mistakes he felt he made during his time leading the site. Those include “too much bragging in the media,” adding “too many staffers too quickly,” and the “core mistake” of not thinking about how to turn the site into a “viable business.”

“Hanlon’s Razor states: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. But honestly, I don’t know which explanation is better suited to ABC,” Silver wrote towards the end of his blog. “During the second half of my tenure with Disney, it felt like they were putting almost literally zero effort into any decisions involving FiveThirtyEight (other than my being featured prominently in their election night coverage).”

New: The Mediaite One-Sheet "Newsletter of Newsletters"
Your daily summary and analysis of what the many, many media newsletters are saying and reporting. Subscribe now!