State of CoinDesk 2017
It’s been a year since Digital Currency Group acquired CoinDesk, merging its New York-based events team with CoinDesk’s distributed media team.
The anniversary itself may be an artificial milestone, but the progress we made is anything but. With this in mind, I wanted to share some reflections on where we’ve been and where we’re going this year.
We want to build a business that is the go-to brand for digital currency and blockchain news, analysis and community, and that provides the top forum for critical discussion among the leaders building this amazing new financial ecosystem.
Here are my takeaways from the past year at CoinDesk:
What We Got Right
We’ve got a long way to go, but our team has made an incredible progress in the past 12 months.
We rebuilt the foundation of CoinDesk. CoinDesk’s resurgence in 2016 wasn’t unlike that of the industry itself.
At acquisition, CoinDesk’s editorial staff was down to two. Pete Rizzo and Stan Higgins worked tirelessly to bring in two excellent new journalists that complement their work (Alyssa and Michael), rebuild our bench of freelance contributors and relaunch our excellent new daily and weekly newsletter. Rizzo also oversaw the successful release of our new research products, and the redesign of our quarterly “State of Blockchain” reports.
The progress we made in rebuilding has set us up for a huge 2017.
But, we wouldn’t have had the resources to restaff without the stellar job done by the business and ops team. Peter Bordes led the management of Consensus 2016, growing the event from ~500 to ~1,500 attendees, quadrupling revenue from the inaugural 2015 event and earning CoinDesk a nomination alongside CES for TSNN’s conference of the year.
The CoinDesk London team (Jeremy, Keith, Jonathan) managed a seamless transition that fueled the Consensus growth and put our New York ops team (Jacob, Dasha) in position to hit the gas this quarter with new, user-friendly advertising products and a redesigned website.
We solidified the Consensus brand. It was the biggest blockchain conference ever held, and attendees told us in a post-event survey that it was also one of the best.
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, 21 CEO Balaji Srinivasan, Silver Lake founder Glenn Hutchins and Delaware Governor Jack Markell headlined a speaker lineup that also included blockchain leads from major enterprise tech and financial services giants; bitcoin, ethereum, and zcash core developers; and startup founders representing over 80% of the venture capital raised to date in the industry.
This year, we’re doubling down on Consensus, with an expected capacity crowd due to descend on Times Square once again in late May.
Forty percent of our 2016 sponsors have already re-signed for 2017, and more than 300 early birds have already registered. And we’re still four months away from showtime. Be on the look-out soon for the big-name speakers who will be joining us this year.
We also received invaluable feedback that led us to pilot an invite-only developer conference, Construct, which will be hosted in San Francisco later this month.
[The speaker list is insane. If you’re a developer, well, it’s never too late to do the right thing. Apply to attend today. :)]
We relocated our entire team to New York. Managing a distributed team is incredibly difficult, and I don’t understand how or why companies do it when their team is small. We moved our crew into new digs in the heart of Times Square, and have thrived ever since.
There’s an amazing office vibe (when it’s not Mercury Retrograde), a rooftop bar and following a successful trial run, a new monthly meetup we’ll run in 2017 called CoinDesk on Tap.
We hope the new digs will help us make CoinDesk a destination that industry execs make a point to visit when they’re in town, for interviews, partnership discussions, and visits. Drop us a line if you’re ever in the area!
Perhaps most importantly, though, we followed through on our initial promise to keep CoinDesk’s operations distinct from Digital Currency Group. Our office is 22 blocks away, and neither Barry Silbert, nor anyone else from DCG has ever weighed in on the company’s editorial decisions.
We’ve put up firewalls to minimize conflicts and preserve CoinDesk’s independent voice.
Where We’re Going
My biggest fear for CoinDesk has always been that we won’t move fast enough to fully capitalize on the opportunity that lies ahead. Yet, in the past several weeks, we’ve made several moves that will really help us hit the gas this year, and accelerate our growth.
Other detailed announcements will follow, but here’s our super secret plan for growth in 2017:
Today, it’s events that keep the lights on at CoinDesk. But we’re investing most heavily in research, data and evergreen content. We’re taking the data tools we’ve already created (index data, venture capital tables, etc.) and adding a ton more functionality, and we’re building more proprietary data sets. We’re refreshing the State of Blockchain reports and our 101 guides, and we’re churning out more paid reports.
And as we add more journalists, it will mean more depth and analysis, not necessarily more articles.
We’re keeping GOOD ads (for now), but are dedicated to experimenting with micropayments. Display advertisements are generally garbage. Someone smart quipped that ads are the internet’s “original sin.” I think that’s overly generous. The reality is that they still make money, but often at the expense of user experience.
So we’re dialing back business with third-party display ad networks that do re-targeting and slow down our site with trackers that jeopardize reader privacy.
We hope that our more natural first-party display ads will continue to do well, and we have some ideas for how to improve even our basic display inventory. In addition, products like our press release service and sponsored briefs (in our newsletters) will help us test the waters of native advertising without muddying the quality of the rest of the site’s content.
But those streams can and should be supplemented by digital currency micropayments.
That’s why we’ve partnered with web browser Brave (try it for the speed, stay for the privacy and ad-free experience), and that’s why we’re planning to explore other similar integrations and partnerships in 2017. It might take a bitcoin media outlet like us to determine which of these micropayment models will really take off.
We have some exciting new additions to our team to announce. Soon, but not yet.
[Did I mention, by the way, that we’re hiring?]
This past year, we restructured CoinDesk and succeeded in turning a top-notch brand into a high-growth business. We are deeply appreciative of the readers, entrepreneurs, attendees, collaborators and even critics who have helped CoinDesk grow into what it is today. And we’re committed to always getting better.
In 2017, we’ll really hit the gas, and hopefully, head to the moon.
Thank you for your support on the way there.
Ryan Selkis
Managing Director, CoinDesk
@twobitidiot
