What happened to TheNumbers.com
Points and comments are a snapshot, not live.
AI scraping and a prediction market hack took down TheNumbers.com.
TheNumbers.com, a definitive film industry data source, vanished on March 5, 2026, after months of AI bot traffic and a likely security breach. Founder Bruce Nash said only 10% of traffic was human. The site was rebuilt from scratch without backups to avoid re-exploitation. The attack may have been aimed at front-running prediction markets on Polymarket. The incident highlights the fragility of small websites under AI-driven scraping and agentic attacks.
What commenters are saying
Commenters debated whether the site's collapse was due to AI scraping or a security breach. Some suggested static site generation or caching as solutions, while others noted that even Wikipedia suffers similar scraping issues. A key point: prediction markets incentivize early data access, which could explain the attack. Several commenters argued that the real problem is that AI scraping has become a DDoS-like burden on small sites, with no penalty for the scrapers.