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Nate Silver Blames Disney Bosses For 538’s Demise: ‘Could Have Been a Good Business’

Silver, who in 2023 left the data analysis site he founded, said that Disney was “never particularly interested” in making it a successful business.

Nate Silver blamed the higher-ups at Disney for the business failures of the political data analysis site he founded, FiveThirtyEight, after news broke this week that the company was shutting it down.

Silver, who left his role as the top editor at the site in 2023, said in a post on his new blog that “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.”

The site—which offered data-driven analysis of politics, sports, economics, and more—is shuttering as its remaining staff of 15 were laid off as part of a broader cull within Disney’s news division.

Silver’s written memorial to 538 had positive things to say about Disney’s role in running the site, which it acquired in 2013. He praised his bosses for being “generous in maintaining the site for so long and almost never interfer[ing] in our editorial process.”

The problem, he continued, was a lack of support on the business side.

“We had an incredibly talented editorial staff, but we never had enough ‘product’ people or strategy people to help the business grow and sustain itself,” he wrote. “It’s always an uphill battle under those conditions, particularly when it comes to recruiting and retaining staff, who were constantly being poached by outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post.”

A representative for ABC News, a subsidiary of Disney which incorporated FiveThirtyEight in 2018, did not immediately respond to the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Silver’s criticism.

Silver, who founded the site in 2008 as a polling aggregator, has remained influential as a political data guru and pundit.

“I don’t know all of the staffers from the most recent iteration of the site, but the ones I have met or who I overlapped with are all extremely conscientious and hard-working people and were often forced to work double-duty as jobs were cut but frequently not replaced,” Silver wrote. “My heart goes out to them.”

The site had been in a downturn after Silver departed and took his powerful election forecasting model with him. In his first stab at election predictions in 2008, he correctly picked the presidential winner in 49 out of 50 states.

Like many other forecasters, Silver’s 538 gave Hillary Clinton a 71 percent chance of winning the presidency in 2016. She ended up losing to Donald Trump, despite a 2 percent edge in the popular vote.

The layoffs, reported by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday night, hit about 200 employees across ABC News and Disney Entertainment Networks—approximately 6 percent of the workforce of those divisions.

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Liam ArchackiNews Reporter

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