Cryptocurrency Prices

Context

When I took over CoinDesk's cryptocurrency price pages, it was because they were in a dire state. These pages, which once generated 80% of our total page views, had dropped to some of our least-viewed content. We'd gone through several rounds of layoffs, leaving us with limited engineering and design resources. I needed to figure out what value we could still offer readers in this changed landscape.

Challenge

The problem went beyond just falling traffic numbers. We were watching a market we once led evolve without us. In crypto's early days, CoinDesk's price pages filled an important information gap, but things had changed. New competitors had built better tools, and our once-leading position was gone. With our smaller team, I had to accept a hard truth: trying to compete directly with these new players wouldn't work with what we had.

Approach

Instead of trying to win back our old position by adding features, I took a step back to rethink our strategy. I researched what competitors were doing, but more importantly, I thought about what makes CoinDesk special. This led to a key insight: while others could build pricing tools, our real strength was our journalism and our ability to explain why prices move the way they do.

I created a four-phase plan to connect our technical abilities with our editorial strengths. This meant carefully using our limited resources while focusing on what makes us unique. Rather than trying to build better pricing tools than everyone else, we would combine market data with our journalism to give readers deeper understanding.

Outcomes

What started as a difficult situation turned into a story of renewal. Over time, traffic to our price pages started increasing again, showing that focusing on what makes CoinDesk unique was the right call. Our recent acquisition of CCData adds another chapter—as we bring their data into our pages, we're building on our approach of providing context behind cryptocurrency prices.

Key Takeaways