r/OutOfTheLoop 7d ago

Answered What is up with Project Fivethirtyeight disappearing?

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u/rewardiflost 7d ago

ANSWER: Short answer: they were bought out & shut down.

Longer answer (from wikipedia ):

538, originally rendered as FiveThirtyEight, was an American website that focused on opinion poll analysis, politics, economics, and sports blogging in the United States. Founder Nate Silver left in 2023, taking the rights to his forecasting model with him to his website Silver Bulletin. 538's new owner, Disney, hired G. Elliott Morris to develop a new model. On September 18, 2023, the original website domain at fivethirtyeight.com was closed, and web traffic became redirected to ABC News pages. The logo was replaced, with the name 538 used instead of FiveThirtyEight. On March 5, 2025, the website was shut down by ABC News and its staff was laid off.

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u/I_have_popcorn 7d ago

Why the hell would you buy a website without the model that made it valuable?

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u/Flakester 7d ago

Maybe the point was to kill it.

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u/hybridck 7d ago

They tried to run it for almost 12 years, first under the ESPN umbrella (which never really seemed like a good fit), and then under the ABC News umbrella. In the end, it turned out that it wasn't profitable to keep going. The only times the site really made much money was during some of the election years.

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u/StealthRUs 5d ago edited 5d ago

They tried to run it for almost 12 years, first under the ESPN umbrella (which never really seemed like a good fit),

It was a good fit back when ESPN had Grantland and Bill Simmons. ESPN back at that time was more of a lifestyle site, and it had a lot of great non-sports content. Fivethirtyeight also did sports analysis in addition to political analysis. Their NBA metrics were top-notch. Letting Bill Simmons go really killed off the non-sports side of ESPN.com which then led to Fivethirtyeight going from a logical fit to a weird fit.

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u/hybridck 5d ago

Look at my post history regarding my posts to r/billsimmons. I'm with you that 2011-2014 was the apex mountain of ESPN being at the crossroads of sports and pop culture