What I learned from my failed crypto news site

Crypto is a fascinating space. As an investment opportunity, it’s highly risky, but also potentially lucrative. According to reports, Bitcoin has lifted over $35,000 for the first time in quite some time. It’s been a long winter, but it means some people are making good money from it.

And then there have been all the dramas of regulation, companies varying wildly in value and going from naming rights for the biggest sporting arenas through to the collapse of the company and the arrest of its CEO.

It’s a wild west for business, and for those with the fortitude for it, one of the most exciting gambles that you can make. I took my own gamble with it, and though it ultimately failed to convert, I learned a lot about the entire media landscape from the experience.

I launched CryptoVista in October 2021. At the time cryptocurrencies were right at the peak of inflated expectations, to use the Gartner term for it, and it seemed that, through regulation and the emergence of big, seemingly stable companies like FTX, the previously speculative asset class was starting to stabilise.

I saw an opportunity there. There were some dedicated media outlets that were focused on crypto, but they tended to be global publications, based overseas. For Australians – who have been avid consumers of crypto – there seemed to be a gap in coverage.

To fill that gap, I recruited an Australian tech industry veteran to head up the editorial team, and a small group of junior journalists to provide the content. We built a website that looked the part, as a finance and tech trade vertical publication, and gave ourselves six months to fill it with content, get some numbers happening, and attract the attention of some of the companies involved in crypto for advertising dollars. We also launched a podcast and had plans on building towards a conference event attached to the brand.

At the end of the six months, the traffic numbers were decent, and we had a growing presence on social media – particularly Twitter (now X), which has always been friendly to the crypto. However, the advertisers were simply not there, so we needed to put the site to pasture.

To an extent, the timing was simply unfortunate: the “crypto winter” hit during those six months and it shook the entire sector. We ran a weekly “Fear & Greed Index” which tracked sentiment, and for most of the six months, the needle was firmly lodged in the “fear” zone. Crypto startups and the vendors that served the space weren’t going to invest resources under such conditions.

But there were other lessons too – examples that will increasingly be relevant to all media publications:

1)????? Traditional forms of media are not well-equipped to handle non-traditional sectors. If you look at where the crypto communities have formed, it’s very much on the new media – social networks, forums like Discord, and so on. They might share the occasional article that they come across, but they’re not going to sign up to newsletters or behave in the way that trade publications tend to rely on to draw advertisers in.

2)????? Traditional forms of media aren’t always where the advertisers are. Marketers go where the communities are, and with crypto big, flashy sponsorships and social media marketing see the bulk of the advertising dollars, leaving relatively little for media publications.

3)????? The crypto space is broad but needs specialist coverage. In hindsight, focusing on global crypto movements, as well as associated asset classes like NFTs was preventing the website from gaining an identity in an emerging space.

In the end, the website was approaching old-world Internet media models to new-world markets. Just as launching a magazine in 2023 is going to be an uphill battle to find relevance and the audience, finding the audience for a dedicated crypto publication to rival the incumbents calls for publishers to embrace Web 3.0 and those newer forms of information delivery.

It was an enjoyable endeavour. CryptoVista was a failure, ultimately, but just like the asset class itself, if nothing else the process of launching and then covering that sector made it clear that there was potential there. Just as the asset class is disruptive to traditional assets, the way that the media grapples with it and speaks to the crypto community will prove to be disruptive to the traditional approaches to media.