Blockworks Results Best-Ever as Competitors Appear to Struggle

Blockworks’s booked revenue hit an all time high last year and the fourth quarter was its best quarter ever. It helps that the price of bitcoin more than doubled as a result of easing regulatory pressures and the election of Donald Trump.

That has to feel pretty good after the volatility of 2022 amid the collapse of the Terra network and FTX, and the general downturn in crypto assets. That was followed by a drop in readership and interest in the industry, forcing some news sites to build SEO-friendly content like the basics of bitcoin and the definition of NFTs.

Blockworks took a different tack, and focused on the crypto native, and in particular developers, over the general public.  

“Everyone’s audience numbers shrank, and ours probably shrank more than other people’s actually, but the dollars that we could command from an advertising and partnership lens were probably 10x what others could command,” Jason Yanowitz, co-founder of Blockworks told AMO. “We had an audience that nobody else in the world could reach.””

They also leaned into building their data and research platform: “Advertisers pay us for that audience, and then we actually can use that audience to go drive customers for the data platform.” 

It seems to have paid off. Blockworks is profitable, though Yanowitz declined to provide details, and he expects additional booked revenue growth 50% in 2025 after seeing growth of 150% last year. And, the company is hiring, adding nine roles to the existing staff of 80. 

Meanwhile, competitor The Block held layoffs last week and CoinDesk fired three senior editorial staffers in December after Bullish made CoinDesk pull a feature story about Tron founder Justin Sun’s purchase of a $6 million piece of art featuring a fresh banana and duct tape.

Yanowitz attributes some of his rivals’s failings to the fact that they were both forced to sell and they sold to exchanges. 

“As soon as you’re owned by an exchange, you lose your trust,” Yanowitz said. Bullish Global bought CoinDesk in late 2023, and around the same time, Foresight Ventures bought a majority stake in The Block—crypto exchange Bitget is an anchor LP for Foresight Ventures. CoinDesk and The Block didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Who Needs Page Views?

Blockworks was founded as an events business about eight years ago and only turned to media when forced to by Covid in January 2021. They looked at their competition and decided they weren’t doing a good job talking to institutional investors.  

“We had the BlackRocks and JP Morgans of the world reading us, which was our unique edge, our unique differentiator, and that came from our institutional conferences,” Yanowitz said.  

Yanowitz is confident enough in Blockworks’s strategy and audience that the company no longer looks at page views as a measure. 

“We just said, let’s write for this very small group of people who are the real professionals operating in the industry, the deeply crypto native people,” Yanowitz said. There’s not that many of them today, but let’s write the best content and create the best content for them, and then eventually that TAM will grow.”

Blockworks is also building up its resilience should another bear market hit the industry by creating a “house of brands” model. Some examples include 0xResearch, focused on the research community, Empire, which looks “behind the curtain” of the crypto industry, and Lightspeed, which centers on the Solana community.  

This allows Blockworks to go niche but also gain in scale.

Yanowitz also pointed to subscription revenue that “has been growing incredibly quickly” and is a lot less volatile than the ad market. Finally, Blockworks is honed in on developers as an audience instead of investors. 

“The problem is, in a bear market, there are no new users, aka new investors, who come into the industry,” Yanowitz said. There will, however, always be developers building—as such, Blockworks is also holding conferences focused solely on developers, including an upcoming event in Brooklyn in June.

Today, Yanowitz doesn’t see Blockworks’s main competitors as other crypto media. 

“We’re more transitioning into a data business with an owned audience on top, as opposed to just a media company,” Yanowitz said.  

Editor’s note: The author of this piece worked at The Block in 2022 and 2023.