One of the three leading cryptonews portals CCN.com is leaving in the midst of a bitcoin rally. Is it just because of Google?
Der Mohr hat seine Arbeit getan (The Moor has done his job)
According to the Norwegian Jonas Borchgrevink CEO and CCN founder, right after the Google Core update, on June 3, CCN traffic from Google search queries from gadgets to CCN site fell by 71% per night:
– Google’s June 2019 Core Update rolled out on June 3th 2019 and CCN’s traffic from Google searches dropped more than 71% on mobile overnight.
Norwegian has published a hot dramatic message – too emotional as for the Scandinavian, perhaps. Borchgrevink firmly denounces Google:
– So yes, this change by Google is directly having a significant impact on us as a small independent news organization that has never received any outside funding. The money we make made on advertisements was directly funneled back into growing the team.
Visibility index has fallen for almost all platforms, including among partners and competitors CoinDesk and Cointelegraph – as for Jonas Borchgrevink. But with CCN, it fell particularly hard.
The dramatic message describes the history of the platform, which had started as CryptoCoinsNews.com 6 years ago with one man, and now the team includes 60 professionals. A huge letter describes all the correct principles of editorial policy, achievements and awards. As well Borchgrevink describes the difficulties and hardships that employees have suffered because of the monopolist google. It looks very doubtful – an attempt to gain sympathy about the fall in personal incomes of employees by 90% and that “6 years of work is evaporated”.
We sympathize with colleagues, but at the same time we cannot ignore the facts and questions that are striking.
- Firstly, it is strange that in just a week the business fell apart.
- Secondly, it is well known that words, when there are too many of them, are used not to state the truth, but to hide it.
- Thirdly, like all participants in the media market, we constantly monitor crypto news. And we noted with concern that the quality of the CCN news feed was falling rapidly over several months. And this is despite the team was strengthened with high-level journalists at the end of 2018 – as it was announced.
And, finally, just a blatant attempt of self-praise of Jonas Borchgrevink’s new business. The team, as if ruined by the machinations of Google, is forced to go to work at HVY.com – founded by the same Jonas Borchgrevink through his Hawkfish AS in March 2019. The mission of HVY.com as an aggregator of journalists is to fight with Google’s monopolist for truth, under the slogan Googlemocracy. This is also displayed in the farewell letter.
P.S. It is highly likely that the Google Core update is not a reason but poor excuse to wind down the business of CCN.com. The main reason is that the market has grown so much that there became a lot of news portals and aggregators. Those survive and stay in business which are ready to not just aggregate news, but provide their vision that meets the needs of community. They try to understand the background of events, dig deeper, present different opinions, draw conclusions and help the community navigate the market situation. Crypto has become the leading theme of many “fiat” media and analytical resources, including Bloomberg, Forbes, and the BBC. Users are overfed with news content. But analysts have become less. Nothing strange. Analytics – this is the information that costs money. And more often it costs big money. Providing such content is difficult and expensive task. In one analytical review, information from a dozen resources is aggregated over a long time interval. That is why such articles really provide valuable information, food for the mind and support for making the right market decisions. What is commonly called EAT: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness.
Not every company is able to make such content and provide it for free. The CCN team probably has chosen a different way.
