A pretty high-profile crypto desk is re-thinking its decision to close out its web accounts and take the ball and go home.
Reports this morning are updating news from yesterday that shows the CCN platform essentially knuckling under due to a lack of support from Google.
“(Google’s June core update) rolled out on June 3th 2019 and CCN’s traffic from Google searches dropped more than 71% on mobile overnight,” wrote Joan Borchgrevink yesterday. “You might say we ought not to face any issues since we’ve been at those levels and lower, in the past. What you need to realize is that we have added more people to the team, both full-timers and part-timers. We do not want to downsize the team, we do not want to break the morale of the team. So yes, this change by Google is directly having a significant impact on us as a small independent news organization that has never received any outside funding. The money we … made on advertisements was directly funneled back into growing the team.”
Borchgrevink said the result is that daily revenue dropped by 90%, claiming the firm had called Google for help with no result, and speculating on a potential “crypto crackdown” by Google, publishing data on losses by other crypto domains.
In what seemed a capricious decision, spokespersons at CCN talked about how the site’s domains are not getting adequate traffic because of low rankings and not showing up in top Google pages.
However, leaders at CCN then noted that some parts of its website started showing up again, and suggested that the closure will not go off as planned, as of this morning.
This news can be interesting for crypto traders in two different ways.
First, since CCN is a major player in crypto news and exchange offerings, its closure would change the landscape of this corner of the technology sector.
But this also shows how crypto exchanges and firms may decide to test the waters under pressure.
If Google is the main driver for digital currency businesses that need visibility and profile, a crypto entity could try to examine whether it is “too big to fail” by threatening to quit, sitting back and looking at Google’s reaction, in the same way that a traditional bank might release news of closure and wait for a government bailout.
In this case, it seems that a major shutdown has been avoided.
However, if you look closely, writers at CCN had noted that the original plan was to move the journalists to another platform – so the closing may have been mostly by name only.
