> Much of FiveThirtyEight’s vital intellectual property — such as the election forecast models — is merely licensed to Disney. The license term for these models expires with my contract this summer. I still own these models, and can license or sell them elsewhere.
Sounds like he had some good leverage going into this deal. Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? Regardless, good for him.
> Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP?
It was probably a risk hedge from them.. he would have wanted a lot more for the full enchilada and they didn't know how it would perform in the future. And now his work is not hard to reproduce so it wasn't a bad call. Every political data team I have heard reporting on essentially concedes that whatever they do ends up more-or-less matching 538.. so it is hard to extract surplus value but also easy to hit that mark roughly.
I follow the NHL and there are a lot of models, they disagree in certain details but they largely agree and the "winner" at the end of any given season isn't winning by much.. even private data isn't a big boost.
And who knows how much of this Disney really cares about going forward outside of the Nate Silver Brand--and had they had wanted that they'd have kept Nate Silver.
Calculating the difference between the 538 brand and the Nate Silver brand at the time of acquisition was probably a bit of a toss-up too. Nate can move on to a substack that generates $2MM a year with 4 staff and be happy while Disney runs 538 at a reasonable margin and be happy and I guess everyone is a winner?
In the meteoric rise of 538, Nate could have easily walked into NYT or any other tech-forward media outlet and negotiated to retain the models. Disney would have lost out then.
Sounds like he had some good leverage going into this deal. Why would Disney have agreed to a temporary license, as opposed to a purchase of this critical IP? Regardless, good for him.