Contextualizing the Crypto News Industry

The other day Messari's Zack Voell posted about what he thought the key strengths of the industry's leading crypto news sites. That got me thinking about the overall reach and visibility of these businesses and where their key strength are from a marketer's perspective.

Using a marketing tool called SEMrush we can learn a number of things about a website's general level of traffic, the performance of their CPC and SEO marketing, and where their users are based. Leveraging this tool, there are a few key insights we can pull about today's leading crypto news sites -- those being @coindesk, @Cointelegraph, @CCNMarkets and @TheBlock__.

It's well-known in crypto media that @coindesk, @Cointelegraph, and @CCNMarkets are the top 3 by traffic globally. Using @semrush, we can see off the bat that they average about 5 million visits per month globally. Begins to put things into context.

We can also see that traffic appears to be heavily weighted to US visitors. I really don't believe this considering how Europe-centric @Cointelegraph and @CCNMarkets are. Thought I'd like to asterisk this that SEMrush GEO data should be taken with a grain of salt here for obvious reasons.

What is interesting is we can actually see this big decline in @CCNMarkets traffic starting in April. This does coincide with Google updating their SEO content algorithm and the "CCN is shutting down" publicity stunt, but apparently it did effect the business overall.

When it comes to the breakdown of traffic sources for each crypto news site, these charts are not unusual but they do emphasize how powerful brand loyalty is, even in media. Although @Twitter sends 75% of all social traffic, we can see that general brand building might be a better focus.

And for you SEO nerds, there's a real battle between @coindesk and @Cointelegraph going on over backlinks. Cointelegraph is close to doubling Coindesk in overall links, but Coindesk's backlink sources are less concentrated, leading to wider coverage and a higher quality score.

I'd also like to shout out @TheBlock__ here for this interesting tidbit -- 29% of their backlinks are to images. This appears to be a standout in this group. Raises some interesting implications for them when scaling SEO and referral performance in the future.

You can visit the original Tweet storm on this topic here.