Crypto News Shop Closes Doors

Crypto media outlet CCN — also known as CryptoCoinsNews — has just revealed that it will be shutting its doors in the coming days. In a fiery editorial piece, Jonas Borchgrevink, the founder of CCN and its network, explained what went down.

Borchgrevink explained that when Google rolled out its “June 2019 Core Update” for its search engine, CCN’s traffic plummeted. In fact, according to SEO sites like Sistrix, the domain’s visibility has plummeted by 53% overall, and 72% on mobile. This means that the outlet’s articles are not being shown as much when you search “Bitcoin” or “crypto”, for instance. This is the lowest the site’s visibility has been since late-2018, prior to its massive spurt of growth.

As a result, Borchgrevink wrote that the site’s revenue has collapsed by “more than” 90%, and that sustaining payroll for its more than 60 staffers, both contracted and full-time, will be tough. The odd thing is, other sites have been affected, but not as much as CCN has been. CoinDesk’s visibility dropped by 34.6%, while CoinTelegraph’s dropped by 21.1% on mobile.

Borchgrevink then laid out some theories, looking to the fact that Google could be cracking down on outlets that push certain political narratives. While CCN doesn’t lean in any direction, its writers have the authority and ability to publish certain pieces that some may deem “offensive” or what have you. This hasn’t been confirmed, as even SEO and Google Search experts don’t have a conclusive answer to what is going on.

The little-known yet important crypto founder then ended the post with a call to action: Google should give three months’ notice to webmasters in regards to updates, be more transparent, and involve “all national governments” to make sure that it is compliant with universal Freedoms. He wrote:

Diversity is at risk. Freedom of the Press is at risk. Freedom of Speech is at risk. Freedom of Information is at risk. Google controls 88.47% of the global desktop search market (April 2019) according to Statista.com. Google controls 93.08% of the mobile search market in the US (April 2019). It’s time that Google makes a change, or that someone does it for them.

This writer (and presumably EWN too) wishes the CCN team well, and the teams of all other sites in the space.

EWN’s Observations

An aside here, this writer has noticed a number of changes in the crypto media space around. Firstly, as the CCN founder suggests, all sites have been impacted in some way, shape, or form — but some more than others.

The Google algorithm for seemingly cryptocurrency news specifically has begun to prefer mainstream media outlets covering the industry, like Bloomberg, Kitco, Forbes, and FxStreet. The days that CCN, CoinTelegraph, NewsBTC, CryptoSlate, this outlet, and others dominated the “Bitcoin” search term are no more. They have been replaced by the aforementioned mainstream financial news outlets.

At the same time, many of the stories pushed by Google to the “Top Stories” site can be a few days old. In fact, this weekend, this writer saw stories that were purportedly trending that were one or two days old, which is far from normal.

Taking Action

For an industry as relatively nascent as crypto and blockchain, this is undoubtedly a huge blow. As a result, EWN along with others in the space such as The DailyHodl, Blokt, Blockonomi, U.today, Bitcoin Exchange Guide, InvestInBlockchain , including CCN, have banded together to discuss potential theories, and more importantly, to potentially formulate a response to Google in a bid to rectify this debacle. This is needed, as a collapse in the media facet of the industry will decrease exposure and stem the free flow of information, thus hurting the industry overall.

Title Image Courtesy of Thor Alvis Via Unsplash

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