Categories: OLD Media Moves

How CoinDesk has become profitable

Kia Kokalitcheva of Axios writes about CoinDesk and how it has generated $20 million in revenue in the first seven months of the year and become profitable with an editorial staff of 25.

Kokalitcheva writes, “CoinDesk was born in May 2013 as the brainchild of entrepreneur and investor Shakil Khan, who had been interested in bitcoin and wanted a simple site to track news and pricing data about the cryptocurrency.

“When we first launched CoinDesk, the goal was simply to supply the market with accurate and reliable information on digital currency,’ Khan tells Axios. ‘As the community increasingly looked to us for the latest industry developments and our perspective on them, building a media business around that based also on data and events felt very organic.’

“Three years later Khan sold the company for just $500,000 to Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group (DCG). At the time it had 10 full-time employees, 700,000 monthly readers, and had raised just under $2 million in seed funding from investors like DCG, 500 Startups and Science Inc.

“Its revenue has since grown tenfold, with a significant portion coming from an expanding events business. Its annual Consensus conference had 8,500 attendees in 2018, up from 625 in its 2015 debut.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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