Disney Puts Final Dagger In 538 After Axing Sports Content In 2023, Nate Silver Shares Disappointment

538 (née FiveThirtyEight) has officially crunched its last number.

The data journalism site founded by Nate Silver and sold to Disney in 2013 found itself part of widespread layoffs across ABC News, the division where the site has been housed since a restructuring in 2018 removed it from ESPN’s purview.

Until recently, 538 operated several verticals outside its well-known politics coverage, with sports being one of its primary draws. The site published numerous predictive models for leagues like the NFL, NBA, and MLB, as well as college football and basketball.

Perhaps surprisingly, for those who know Silver for his election modeling and commentary, the 538 founder got his start in data-driven journalism at Baseball Prospectus. There, he fleshed out a sabermetric forecasting system called PECOTA and wrote columns for the blog.

Needless to say, sports were fundamental to 538’s early growth and development. (As previously mentioned, the site was originally under ESPN’s umbrella at Disney.)

Silver departed 538 in 2023 when he and Disney mutually parted ways at the expiration of his contract. Simultaneously, Disney slashed the site’s staffing and fully cut its sports vertical the same year.

Now, writing for his Substack Silver Bulletin, Silver has spoken out about his former site’s undoing, blaming constant stress in non-election years (when traffic naturally declined) and Disney’s mismanagement.

“Having been through several rounds of this before, including two years ago when the staff was cut by more than half, and my tenure expired too, I know it’s a brutal process for everyone involved,” Silver wrote. “It’s also tough being in a business while having a constant anvil over your head, as we had in pretty much every odd-numbered (non-election) year from 2017 onward.

“…the basic issue is that Disney was never particularly interested in running FiveThirtyEight as a business, even though I think it could have been a good business,” Silver continued.

The On the Edge author described the recent success of his Substack, which keeps valuable content like forecasting models behind a paywall and other content like polling averages in front of it. Such a business model at 538 could’ve made the site more sustainable financially.

For sports fans, even though the site has not served them for some time now, the death of 538 will still hit home. For years, the site was the backbone of any analytics or stats coverage on ESPN, and podcasts like Hot Takedown were must-listens for the data-inclined sports enthusiast.

A generalist data-driven sports publication hasn’t really been replicated since. Sure, individual sports all have their places where data wonks can go and find advanced analytics and forecasts. But post-538, no site has been able to provide that for all sports — certainly not in as accessible a way as 538 was able to, at least.

That’s simply the reality of our fragmented media environment these days. Unfortunately, there really isn’t a huge market for someone who wants to read deep-dive columns on hockey and golf and baseball and football analytics.

It’s not a bold prediction to say that that type of site will likely never exist again.

Tuesday evening’s news was just another reminder of that.

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