Nate Silver reveals FiveThirtyEight almost sold to The Athletic before ABC News deal

FiveThirtyEight, the now-defunct data journalism publication founded by Nate Silver, was a true unicorn in digital media. The site, which covered two distinct verticals — sports and politics — offered high-brow reportage, ranging from presidential election models to why the collapse of the 2011 Boston Red Sox should go down in history as one of the worst all-time.

Silver’s publication is back in the news this week for unfortunate reasons. Like many bespoke digital publications of yore, FiveThirtyEight has seemingly had its archive eviscerated, with no rhyme or reason given by Disney or ABC News, which owns the site’s back catalog.

The revelation has Silver, who left FiveThirtyEight in 2023, writing about the site’s history on his Substack, Silver Bulletin. And in a recent post, Silver revealed just how close FiveThirtyEight was to leaving Disney entirely back in 2018, sharing that a deal with The Athletic was practically on the goal line before things went awry.

After a short independent stint after its 2008 launch, Silver licensed FiveThirtyEight to The New York Times, where it remained from 2010 to 2013. Following three years at the Times, Silver sold the publication to Disney, where it landed under the ESPN umbrella alongside other digital startups like Grantland. That’s where FiveThirtyEight remained until 2018, when Silver’s contract was set to expire.

Then came some weirdness. When Silver sold his site to Disney in 2013, he retained ownership of some of the key things that made FiveThirtyEight what it was, namely his proprietary models. Silver’s myriad of election and sports models drove much of the inherent value of his publication. While Disney owned the brand, the intellectual property, and the archive, Silver owned the main reason people visited the site. So when his contract came up, Disney’s options were to retain Silver or sell FiveThirtyEight; there was little point in retaining the FiveThirtyEight brand without Silver at the helm.

Knowing this, Silver took some meetings. As was reported at the time, FiveThirtyEight was being shopped to several suitors, including The Atlantic and The Athletic. Ultimately, Disney re-signed Silver and retained FiveThirtyEight, shifting it out of the ESPN umbrella and into the ABC News umbrella. But, according to Silver’s recent account of events, a deal with The Athletic was nearing the handshake stage when, at the last minute, ESPN realized its corporate sister, ABC News, was interested in acquiring FiveThirtyEight.

Here’s Silver:

We came quite close to securing a deal with The Athletic, close enough that the founders came to New York for an entire week of meetings to sort through every detail. I’d expected things to culminate with a handshake agreement and a celebratory lunch before they headed back to California. If you know anything about my organizational skills, they aren’t great, but I thought we (me and the other senior staff) did a reasonably good job of softening the ground for a potential transition to The Athletic and a subscription-based business model. This wasn’t a hard sell because most of the staff would be offered jobs at the new organization.

Long story short: the potential deal with The Athletic hit a last-minute snafu, which there might have been time to work around if there hadn’t been a hard deadline imposed by Disney, but Disney needed a decision from us. The sale process was complex: Disney owned some of the key IP (the trade name and site archive), while I owned some of it (the models). Moreover, Disney was both running the sales process and represented one of the bidders (ABC News). Somewhat bizarrely, ABC, a Disney related party, had entered the bidding at some point midway through the process; apparently, there had been some signals crossed about this in Burbank, and ESPN hadn’t realized that ABC had been interested.

In the years since, Silver outlines how Disney and ABC News mismanaged FiveThirtyEight, never truly investing in the company and refusing to implement a subscription-based model that Silver believes would’ve made the publication solidly profitable. Instead, FiveThirtyEight was gutted in 2023, a couple of months before Silver’s contract with Disney expired. ABC News tried to run what essentially amounted to a husk of the site for the 2024 election, which didn’t go well, and then shuttered the publication officially in 2025.

Who knows where FiveThirtyEight would’ve ended up had the The Athletic deal happened in 2018? Ironically, the publication would eventually have been under The New York Times’ control again after the paper purchased The Athletic in 2022. At least one thing is pretty certain, however. Those archives that ABC News seemingly did away with this week? They’d still be up on the Times, which has kept all of FiveThirtyEight’s work from 2010 to 2013 online and readily accessible.