Coinbase nixed news feature amidst traffic decline for crypto news
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Coinbase, the U.S.'s largest crypto exchange, quietly removed the newsfeed from its app a few months back.
Why it matters: Crypto media publications are suffering traffic woes, likely for a lot of the same reasons mainstream sites are — but the change at Coinbase removed a constant source of eyeballs that the industry's media could count on.
Between the lines: "From time to time we make updates to the design of the app based on user engagement," a spokesperson from Coinbase explained, saying the news feed feature was dropped in March.
The big picture: Crypto news is a vulnerable corner of the already fragile media industry. Estimated traffic across top crypto media publications has generally been on a downward trend this year, according to internet measurement company Similarweb.
- That started around March for Cointelegraph, CoinDesk, the Block, and Blockworks. DLNews was the exception.
- For June, preliminary month-over-month traffic on CoinDesk and the Block is down 25%, and 29% on Blockworks.
Flashback: Similarweb also helped Axios run some of these numbers back in 2022, and everyone is way down here from those days.
What they're saying: The Block's editor-in-chief, Tim Copeland, noticed the removal of the newsfeed in May, and on Tuesday said on X:
- "Digging into the numbers and looks like Coinbase removing its news feed has impacted top crypto news sites much more than I originally thought."
- "It's genuinely so over," he wrote, citing a common industry catchphrase. (He told Axios on Wednesday he intended the line as a joke.)
- In May, Copeland projected traffic would drop 15% to 25%, including for the Block; a month later, he's saying overall volumes were down 30% — possibly due to the Coinbase move and a "stagnating market."
Coinbase users have taken notice and posted a thread about it on Reddit, speculating as to why the exchange might've done away with news.
State of play: 😮💨 The world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, and data provider CoinMarketCap still have a news feature.
- CoinGecko, another data provider, does too.
The intrigue: Traditionally, crypto news traffic has always seemed to follow price (see 2017 and 2021).
- But it seems like those days are over. We had an all-time high for bitcoin earlier this year and it barely got the news sites to 2020 numbers.
Brady Dale contributed additional reporting.
Editor's note: The story has been updated to clarify remarks by Block editor-in-chief Tim Copeland.
