Key takeaways

• Crypto media outlets have collapsed as businesses, with CoinDesk selling for about $75 million, DappRadar shutting down, Blockworks closing its newsroom and DL News closing in 2026 despite tripling its revenue.

• A CoinGecko survey of 2,558 crypto users found 73.8% get most of their information from X, YouTube or Telegram and only 6.5% from news websites, so a crypto press release no longer buys reach.

• Press coverage still buys credibility with investors, institutions and AI search engines, while reach has moved to owned media such as newsletters, podcasts and founder accounts.

Crypto media outlets have had a brutal few years, and if your marketing plan still has a line that says "get coverage in the crypto press," it's worth looking at what happened to the press. CoinDesk, the industry's flagship outlet, was bought for $500,000 in 2016, was once hoped to fetch $300 million, and sold in 2023 for roughly $75 million, according to Fortune. A year later Fortune reported that the new owner, the crypto exchange Bullish, dismissed the editor-in-chief and two deputy editors. Fortune's report, citing unnamed sources, said the dismissals came weeks after editors were made to take down an article about the crypto billionaire Justin Sun.

CoinDesk was one of the lucky ones. The saddest data point came in May 2026, when DL News announced it was closing despite growing revenue 270% in 2025 and crossing seven figures in sales, blaming AI for collapsing search traffic. An outlet tripled its revenue and still couldn't survive, and at AnkhLabs we'd read that as the clearest sign that the business model underneath it was gone.

The outlets didn't lose their audience to a competitor. They lost it to everyone.

What happened to crypto media outlets?

Most crypto media outlets have shrunk, been sold or closed since 2023. CoinDesk sold for about a quarter of its hoped-for price, DappRadar shut down, Blockworks closed its news division, Messari cut staff and DL News closed in 2026, because readers moved to social platforms and AI answers cut the search traffic that paid for newsrooms.

The pattern holds across very different businesses, from data sites to venture-backed newsrooms, and it spread beyond crypto-native outlets in 2026 when Robinhood shut down its own finance news site.

The survivors tell the same story from the inside. When Blockworks killed its newsroom and went all-in on data and research subscriptions, investors responded by raising its valuation 42% to $192 million. The market put a price on the two halves of a media company, and the price of news was zero. Robinhood made the same call from the other direction, keeping Sherwood's newsletters and in-app news while dropping the standalone website, because the audience was already inside its own product.

Where do crypto readers get their news now?

Crypto readers now get most of their news from social platforms and creators rather than outlets. A CoinGecko survey of 2,558 crypto users found that 73.8% get most of their crypto information from X, YouTube or Telegram, while only 6.5% rely mainly on news websites, so the audience followed people instead of mastheads.

The CoinGecko numbers break down to 34.4% on X, 23.4% on YouTube and 16.0% on Telegram. The readers kept reading but stopped going to outlets to do it, and the value moved with them. A two-person newsletter called Milk Road went from zero to 250,000 subscribers and a sale in ten months, and a16z, the biggest crypto investor in the world, now ships its podcast and newsletter five times a week under the open doctrine "own your distribution". The move toward individual voices is also the ground covered in our guide to crypto KOL marketing, where KOL means a key opinion leader, the industry's word for an influencer.

AI search is taking the rest. Pew Research found that Google users who saw an AI summary clicked a traditional search result in 8% of visits, against 15% when there was no summary, and clicked a link inside the summary only 1% of the time. That is the traffic DL News said it lost, and no outlet can win it back by writing better headlines.

Do crypto press releases still work?

A crypto press release still works for credibility but no longer works for reach. With only 6.5% of crypto users relying on news websites, a wire release or a round of coverage will rarely bring in users, but a real article by an independent journalist still reassures investors, arms champions inside institutions and gives AI search engines a source you don't control.

Coverage used to deliver reach and credibility at once, and most marketing plans haven't noticed that the two came apart. The reach part is gone, because the readers are on social platforms and in chat apps and the surviving outlets have a fraction of their old traffic. What remains is credibility, and that part got more valuable. A neutral article about you is one of the few things that convinces an investment committee, and it's exactly the kind of outside corroboration AI models look for when they answer "what's the best X" questions.

So the earned-media strategy flips. You stop pitching for reach, because the reach isn't there, and you start earning a small number of credible citations that do quiet work in diligence packets and AI answers for years. Meanwhile the reach moves in-house, because the audience that crypto media outlets used to gather is now assembled one subscriber at a time by whoever bothers to show up consistently. AnkhLabs' work with LINGO shows the shape of it, with acquisition and audience-building run as one programme that brought 300K+ users onboarded and 250K+ new X followers, as reported by client and platform data.

What we'd tell a founder about crypto media outlets and PR

Start the owned channel before you need it. A newsletter or podcast that ships every week is slow and boring and completely yours, and the Milk Road story shows how fast consistency compounds. The list you build this year is the only distribution that will still belong to you in three years, and it solves the problem we described in acquiring wallets you can never reach again.

Let the founder be the outlet. The 73.8% who get their information from X, YouTube and Telegram are following people, not publications. A founder who publishes real thinking on a schedule does what the trade press used to do, with more trust and no gatekeeper, which is the case we made for founder-led marketing, and the media collapse makes it stronger.

Use press for proof, not reach. Aim for a handful of genuinely credible citations a year rather than a stream of paid placements. Choose journalists whose bylines still mean something, give them real material instead of announcements, and then put those citations to work in your data room, your comparison pages and everywhere AI models read.

Measure media by what it converts. Track which citations come up in sales conversations, which newsletter subscribers become users and which coverage investors quote back to you. Impressions from a shrinking channel are the emptiest number in marketing. An owned channel gives you numbers you can act on, as when content built around trading topics brought Bitget 10,000+ new followers at a 3.8% click-through rate in work AnkhLabs supported, as reported by client and platform data.

More examples sit in our case studies, and the service behind them is content and creative production. If you're moving budget from press releases to owned media and want a second opinion on the plan, talk to AnkhLabs.

Everyone is a publisher now

The crypto press didn't shrink because crypto stopped being interesting. It shrank because distribution moved to platforms, then to individuals and now to AI, while the outlets were built for a world where they owned the audience. That audience is still there, sitting in feeds and inboxes waiting to be gathered by someone, and the protocols that accept they're publishers now, and staff for it, inherit what the outlets lost. The ones still emailing press releases into a shrinking room are marketing to a graveyard.

Frequently asked questions

What are the main crypto media outlets in 2026?

The best-known crypto media outlets still publishing news include CoinDesk, Cointelegraph, The Block and Decrypt. The field has thinned, since DL News closed in May 2026 and Blockworks closed its news division in October 2025 to focus on data and research. Much of the real audience now sits with newsletters, podcasts and individual creators on X and YouTube.

Why did DL News shut down?

DL News, the news arm of the data site DefiLlama, closed at the end of May 2026 even though its revenue grew 270% in 2025. The team said AI had accelerated the collapse of search traffic and enabled copycat aggregation, and that traffic across crypto and tech media had contracted severely, leaving too little audience to fund the journalism.

Is a crypto press release worth it?

Only for credibility. Paid wire releases rarely bring users, because only 6.5% of crypto users mainly read news websites. A crypto press release is still useful as a public record that journalists, investors and AI search engines can find, so keep it short and factual and spend most of the budget on owned channels and genuine earned coverage.

What is owned media for a crypto project?

Owned media is any channel a crypto project controls directly, such as a newsletter, podcast, blog, research reports or the founder's own social accounts. Unlike paid placements or press coverage, the audience stays with you. Milk Road showed the upside by growing a newsletter to 250,000 subscribers in ten months before it was acquired.