FiveThirtyEight Closed as Part of Larger Cost Cutting at Disney and ABC

Few websites were more simultaneously anxiety-inducing and comforting than FiveThirtyEight. The website's entire brand was built around polling, and it spun that off into interesting work in a variety of journalistic fields related to data.

In early March of 2025, though, FiveThirtyEight went offline, leading some to wonder precisely what had happened to it. Here's what we know:

FiveThirtyEight was taken offline as part of broader cuts by Disney to ABC, which FiveThirtyEight was a part of. According to The Wall Street Journal, Disney cut 200 positions across ABC, which included shutting down the data website completely.

Prior to their decision to shut the website down, its staff had been dwindling, and was down to just 15 people at the time of the shuttering. The site employed 35 people as recently as 2023.

Nate Silver was the site's original founder, and built the entire thing partially as an extension of his own modeling around presidential elections. In a post on X, he offered his own remembrance of the website, which he left two years ago when his contract with Disney expired. Since then, he has continued to model elections independently, and may have diluted the brand associated with the website as a whole.

"My heart goes out to the people there," he wrote. "They were tremendously hard-working and produced a lot of extremely valuable data and insight for everyone who wants to understand politics better. They deserved much better.”

Strangely, Disney elected to pull down the entire site instead of leaving an archive up, which does not cost much money to maintain.

The closing of FiveThirtyEight is indicative of the general downturn in media. It's far from the only example of a news outlet that closed its doors as more and more journalists start self-publishing. Perhaps tellingly, that's exactly what Silver did after he left the outlet, a move that is more individually lucrative but also leads to far less oversight than what is available at a news outlet with more rigorous standards.

The website's closure was eulogized not just by Silver, but also by many other people who worked there or were influenced by the site.

"FiveThirtyEight changed my life. I would not be the writer I am today without their articles. I would not be interested in politics without their podcast. Their influence on me is incalculable," one person wrote.

"This is so incredibly sad — FiveThirtyEight revolutionized what it meant to make political data accessible to the public," another person added.

Although plenty of people only looked at the election forecasts, FiveThirtyEight was a source of indespensible data collection in a world filled with too much of it. They covered sports and science in addition to elections, and they covered those areas well. Now, like so many other things that used to be powerful forces on the internet, the site is completely gone, and you need The Wayback Machine just to see it.