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.