If you have to give tips to founders who needs to increase their personal brand, where would you start? >> It's always good to start from the very beginning like the core. You need to identify who inside.
If there is something fake in between, it's not going to work. >> What actually happens with the Google algorithm recently? Why Cointelegraph lost all traffic?
>> Since AI features are used by lots of content producers, Google started to react to that. At the same time, Google is training its own system on AI. So, Google is interested.
I do not believe in SEO anymore the way it used to be. The >> changes that you've had to go through going from traditional finance media versus web media. >> The initial difficulty was to actually understand what is a digital asset.
Could you guys foresee that this will happen to the market? Whereas if we check the traffic on the similar web then we can see that being crypto is actually the most stable. >> This is known a show about tech marketing experts who used branding mastery to build not only their project but also themselves.
>> My name is Mary and we have Stella here and our beautiful guest Alona Fasu. She is the CEO of being crypto news media. How are you feeling today?
How is Binance Blockchain Week? I'm feeling fantastic. Energized with people's energy, but a little bit tired of all the flights.
>> For sure. For sure. Yeah.
You were in in Defcon before, right? In Buenosaris. >> Yes, I was in Buenosiris and it took me like 20 hours of flight to get here.
So, we're a little bit jacked lagged. So, >> for sure. So, yeah, Alena um thank you so much for being here today.
We would like to start with your journey. So you have experience of 20 years in the media and I want to know how did crypto come into the picture for you. I think the whole story of my career, the whole career path that I had uh was like the different like really broad expertise that I got from different parts of one picture that brought me to basically building a crypto media cuz initially I started as the editor of the financial news feed.
This is where I'm coming from. uh I worked for a broker and we build our own news feed sometimes creating our like the new words because it didn't exist in uh the financial system of Russia of those times then I moved to the role of editor of a financial magazine one of the oldest again in Russia and then after that I moved into financial analyst role in one of the biggest international brokers so that's how I came to the point when I started to analyze not only uh forex commodities and stocks but also digital assets and the first one was obviously bitcoin so it was I think somewhere around 2014 and where this was my first touch point with bitcoin >> I see and I am very curious in terms of the difficulties or the changes that you've had to go through going from traditional finance media versus web3 media Yeah. >> Um the initial difficulty was to actually understand what is a digital asset and how it works.
I remember that I tried to do some fundamental analysis and apply technical analysis to Bitcoin. Those times obviously it was not possible. Nothing worked for uh digital assets those times.
It was basically a very narrow environment of crypto enthusiasts and a lot of hype, a lot of media uh influence and uh yeah that was one of the problems initially and obviously from business perspective it was an absolutely new world for me in terms of uh communication, building relationships, having the network because it didn't exist those times >> for sure. It's interesting because I remember back in the days when I just entered crypto world in 2018. Uh I've heard a lot about like I worked at some agency and I've heard a lot about like an amazing writer that is helping us with articles about Bitcoin and fundamental analysis and that was actually Alona and that's was like when we met first time and um I'm just curious to know like then you decided to start like being crypto like as your own business.
So you're at the same time entrepreneur, CEO and you're a very experienced writer. So um how is it helping you for example to hire um good journalists or to hire good contributors like uh editors to be in crypto? Are you using the skills nowadays?
>> I think my biggest superpower was not about even writing although I do have the degree in philology. My biggest experience is my analytical skills and this is why I was this great writer. I I was actually the financial analyst and this is how we worked with the PR agency because I was the official face the representative of the broker and uh I was commenting on everything what was going on and there were very few analysts who actually was able to comment on uh uh digital assets.
Uh so uh I did not participate in the choice of uh writers um from the very beginning. Never. I probably was able to find somebody from my previous fintech network but obviously the all the decisions were made by editor-inchief.
Uh so my first decision to found a company when founding a company was to find the right people to start with. So when I I was mentioning it several times we started with the people of four. So the first one was SEO guy uh the head of SEO and right now he is my only co-founder.
He was the first employee I had and he is taking care of all the technical direction. The second was to hire editor-inchief and the first editor-in chief of being crypto currently is edi an editor-inchief of the blog and yeah and then the third uh person to join our team was the social media guy. So it was very lean uh very MVP approach.
That's how it started. >> So you're not micromanaging and you kind of divide like um your role as a CEO and like the editorial part of the team. >> Yeah, I'm the this kind of manager who uh is switching the roles constantly.
In most cases, I'm the connector, but I'm also a teacher, a coacher, uh supporter, uh and I'm the analytical and strategic brain of the company. Uh we obviously we have a very strong technical presence with Danny Polo who is the co-founder and with our CTO uh chief technical officer. uh but everything what is related to editorial it's uh obviously defined by editor-inchief.
Yeah, I think this is a good strategy and kind of showing that the media is really mature because in cryp media landscape we can see that um especially like three tier three media they kind of mixing like commercial and editorial part unfortunately u but I hope they're going to change I think it's changing quite rapidly but uh do you miss writing >> or you kind of amplify the skills into your personal branding? Yeah, that's probably one of the I I do love writing and uh I love uh not writing for the sake of writing. I I love analyzing something and then sharing my opinion.
And you probably can notice it in my LinkedIn because every time I'm attending something or reading something interesting or contacting somebody inspiring, I'm sharing it in my LinkedIn account. >> Yeah. Yeah, for sure.
You're very active. I think like once you once you get this power to represent officially the brand that uh you're leading then uh you just went viral like I I've seen the career growth like maybe not the career growth but your personal brand growth like um how do you say yeah exponentially like blowing once you became like the CEO of um being crypto and which is great >> yeah but I didn't put this focus for during the first years the First years were like really really tough years. It was a lot of work, a lot of uh building uh a lot of hiring, a lot of uh strategizing.
Right now I have a little bit more time and I do believe that it's also part of uh the responsibility of the founder who is representing the brand who is ready to represent the brand not everybody wants that. >> Yeah. So for you the personal branding came kind of um after building right?
It was not something that you did simultaneously. >> Yeah, it came after during the first three years we were totally focused on >> building startup mode. Tough startup mode.
>> No, that that's the point that the startupers are usually start talking and selling and pitching before they actually build something. So my approach was a little bit different only at the time I was absolutely sure that we are stable. We know what we are doing.
We finalized our mission and vision. I I'm ready to represent this brand. >> And now you're extremely active.
We were talking about your socials, but you also have awards nominations. You're being a judge, a speaker, invited everywhere, including here on our podcast. Um, what is your secret recipe for personal brand?
If you have to get to give tips to founders who need to increase their personal brand, where would you start? Yeah, >> it's always good to start from the very um beginning like from the core you need to identify who are you uh inside what kind of role you play in the company. Uh >> obviously if you are defining the vision and mission of the company you are supposed to be the DNA of this vision and mission.
Exactly. If there is something fake in between it's not going to work. uh it's not like somebody is writing for you or somebody telling you what is the right target audience or what is the right tone of voice.
You initially you need to define it yourself what kind of tone of voice what kind of uh communication is good for you. Somebody is really good in um pres presenting, somebody is good at at writing and then you go to the professionals like you uh and define it all together. What would be the next stage?
How exactly is the best way to express myself because I have this kind of superpowers. >> Yes. Okay.
So what I hear from you is basically you have to understand yourself, understand who you are and stay kind of true to this. discover your superpowers. Yes.
>> And then use them to build your personal brand. >> Exactly. >> Okay.
>> I think it's worth building a decent project as well. >> Yeah, for sure. Although some people get away with >> but it's short term.
It's very short term. Um I think that for also something that really defines being crypto is the long-term vision, right? Because from the very beginning you built the brand with the goal of uh like having keeping your integrity, right?
instead of selling out and uh promoting projects which were not very. So yeah, you >> I had my five years plan from the very beginning. I I started the business from the financial plan that I pitched to investors and in this financial plan it was clear uh where we're going to start uh what other languages we're going to expand into and uh how we're going to grow and uh we we had multiple goals for the next several years.
Mhm. So yeah, it seems like the brand of being crypto and your personal brand are both based on this, right? Like this analytical um mindset also the authenticity and the integrity side of things.
It's very interesting like your brand, your company and your personal brand are basically based on the same values as you were saying. >> Absolutely. That's the point that uh if you build something um sustainable something for long term uh you need to be aligned with your core values and your DNA and then you start hiring you kind of cherrypick the people who share those values and currently it's great that we have HR department who is taking care of making sure that all the team membersharing our DNA understanding what is our core and basically our HR is supporting all the corporate culture to make sure that everybody is aligned >> and how many people do you have now >> uh around 150 but it's like pretty volatile right now >> and do you do you know everyone by name >> unfortunately um I think maybe like 90% yes maybe only the newcomers uh was keeping my attention but uh the core of the team is here.
Uh we have many people uh who stayed with us for more than 5 years. >> Amazing. So at what point I'm just curious because we're also expanding pretty rapidly and we have like 35 people now.
And at what point you start to like uh lose your navigation? >> Start start right now. 35 is already 35 is already this I think it's the threshold uh because this is the point when you definitely need very good uh organizational structure clear roles uh yeah clear understanding of the departments and HR who is defining everything >> yeah that's that that's so true >> actually I had a question exactly about this about the scale of in crypto because you guys are very diverse.
I believe your team is also extremely diverse, right? Uh and you're targeting a lot of different regions. Uh how do you pick the regions that you choose to expand on?
I mean, you had this plan. You mentioned your five-year plan. How did you pick the regions that you're going to target?
Obviously analysis um we we use different sources uh starting from Google Analytics uh and similar web hrefs and ending with uh even the amount of traffic of um cryptocurrency aggregators uh because this is the way to identify where is the another big potential for the audience um somebody like I don't you know, Coin Market Cap, uh, Trading View, Coin Gecko, they already have multiple languages and, uh, obviously the crypto trader environment is, uh, using, uh, those websites on a regular basis. So the the starting point is just to go and check what languages, what countries they have there and uh, uh, think about how we can expand into. Of course, the next stage is identifying the SEO potential, the competition and many other things, but the starting point is pretty simple.
>> That really explains why you guys are partnering with such uh websites and media as Trading View, FX Street, FX Street, right? >> Yeah. Coin Gecko as well.
So, it was one of my questions, but I think it's pretty clear now. >> No, it's actually with them. We are um partnering in many directions.
It's multiple. It's starting from data like we you with coin gecko we use their API and our markets data is based on coin gecko. Uh but also we are providing our content we are sharing audience we are building uh the syndication.
So whatever content we are producing, it's automatically goes to multiple sources and the strong ones in multiple languages. Yeah, we we also build a lot of uh campaigns together. Uh, for example, we just recently, I think yesterday, I skipped that one, but we planned it uh in advance, we had a podcast dedicated to crypto news outlets, direction and trends in AI era.
And we invited our FX Street uh partners. We invited uh the friends from New York Post and uh some representatives of mainstream media. >> Oh, wow.
That that that's really cool. I think that's really smart. um strategy behind growing the media brand and talking about AI um we have like a block of questions about Google algorithm and using AI tools in media.
So can you explain us what actually happened with the Google algorithm recently and why why Cointelegraph lost all traffic? Uh just a disclaimer, I'm not an AEO expert and obviously I'm not the official representative of Google. We have multiple hypothesis.
Uh and I can share because I already shared it in my LinkedIn. I can share some of the uh potential reasons. So the first question was about Google algorithm.
The thing is that Google is constantly updating its algorithm. Uh previously when we started it happened every three months and uh that was something that everybody expected, everybody was aware. We were uh we were ready to adjust and uh follow the rules of Google and it has always been like that.
But uh during the last year, I think at the end of the last year, uh Google started to uh launch uh this huge upgrades on quite uh a more frequent uh basis. So sometimes it happened like every other month, sometimes it happened every month. And right now there is no this clear structure that we used to have before.
So right now since the AI features are used by lots of content producers uh obviously Google started to react to that and at the same time Google is training its own system on AI. So it Google is interested in making sure that it trains its own data on a good quality content. Making sure that commercial is not misleading uh or not presented as an original content.
It's a complete difference. So if it's news, it's news. You cannot name press release news.
This is what we still getting in the market. If it's press release, it's press release and it follows some specific structure. If it's news, it should be labeled as news and if there are some referral links, it's already basically uh breaking the rules of uh original reporting of uh uh honest journalism and etc.
So the this is the core for Google is always uh what it values the content. So, and the reason why many websites, not only crypto websites, started to lose traffic during the last year is this. Google started to put more focus and attention on the quality of AI generated content specifically.
And then second, it started to create its own AI uh overviews that basically replaced some of the content producers that did not produce news stories but more focused on long-term evergreen content like listicles, overviews, reviews, everything right now is taken by Google. Um I can give you an example of a company called Nerd Wallet which has been huge. I think finder doc as well they've been uh really strong brands in terms of listical reviews of financial assets.
Uh during the last two years uh they lost uh from 30 to 80% of their traffic. Uh finder lost 80, nerd wallet lost 30 and it's still ongoing. Although the quality is fantastic but it's this evergreen content.
This is one part and then another part is uh how Google is reacting to something that is changing in news outlets environment. Obviously since traffic started to decrease uh news outlets started to struggle because there is not enough traffic to monetize. If you are not monetizing it means uh you are not surviving or you kind of have to decrease either prices or the quality of uh partners of commercial partners.
So I think the uh news outlets that got um erased from Google during uh the recent months and it's not only Cointelegraph there are multiple sources. They are the the ones that started to decrease the quality of the commercial partners. Uh obviously your money your life is still there.
It's the core for Google. So whatever is uh gambling uh whatever is meme coins or other um like i gaming all the gray areas content is uh something that Google doesn't like and sometimes it gives you you know like signals >> decreasing uh the >> traffic >> not significantly but uh like decreasing the visibility. So you can definitely see that discovery traffic decreased and I think the news outlets notice that.
But it's the question what uh what is the next decision? If you see that Google already sent you the signal, you need to adjust the strategy. You need to remove something that doesn't look good and maybe find some other opportunities to grow traffic.
If you are not listening uh once, twice, three times you are getting completely erased because in case of Cointelegraph you cannot even search them. Uh it's not uh shown in search. In case of um Bitcoinist news BTC uh I think bitcoin.
com as well they are spiking and going down. There is a lot of manipulation going on. Um but so far they kind of still surviving but they are seen they are just pessimized uh but they are still seen in uh the Google list.
>> Yeah that's really interesting because recently we have tried to search for Cointelegraph on Google and the first thing that we got was coindesk and um >> because they have tags. >> Yeah. next to coinh coin desk there was like are you looking for Cointelegraph like check our website something like this so we're kind of playing with with the with the brand >> um so that sounds to me that you guys have really good like SEO specialists so could you guys foresee that this will happen to the market because if we check the web if we check the traffic on the similar web then we can see that being crypto is actually like the most stable uh top tier like crypto media.
Um so what what is your secret behind this? What what happened or are you just lucky? >> No, we are definitely not lucky.
We are super analytical. Um like I I mentioned we my co-founder was initially hired for the SEO role. Obviously he is not uh taking uh this role right now but he still has a lot of expertise.
Uh I do not believe in SEO anymore the way it used to be. I I think right now the core message from Google is quality quality and um yeah if you follow the rules and you continue to improve the quality this is uh the way to do uh in in terms of like leading indicators that something is going to be wrong with your website. uh it's usually the spikes of traffic and the spikes of crawling activity of Google bots.
This is what can definitely tell you that there is something that Google uh doesn't like or wants to check. Uh so how it's it h it happens uh you have the spike of traffic most probably if you have the spike it's manipulated >> especially if you never experienced those spikes before and Google uh clearly sees something is wrong and maybe it's uh uh black SEO or some uh backlink strategy so all kind of manipulation Google comes and sends the bots to crawl the website and to check what's happening. Maybe it's uh something with the website with the website map or whatever.
If they are finding something weird, they are sending you manual reviewers and then manual reviewers are coming and checking the parts of the website that um especially if it's news in financial sector the parts um related to the company to the policy to the writers to their background. So all those core things and then they are checking if there are affiliate links in the news where it should not be and all the rest >> that should be used for our sales features to the clients right back links and paid content. >> Yes.
Yes. >> And the second part of the question was why we are so stable. So we are not um hunting for huge spikes.
We are not trying to hack the system. We are keeping uh improving our content quality. Obviously, our website is not perfect.
Obviously, there is a lot to improve and we keep doing that. We unfortunately we do not have millions of dollars on just uh UX UI spendings. We're a poor media website.
But um what we do we constantly adjust uh to the situation. So what happened 2 years ago um when there was this memecoin craze starting you remember when everybody was launching their meme coins most of them were shitcoins and uh many news outlets started to promote it and it was a very new thing. Nobody knows if it's legit or not.
What is considered to be a good one if it's launched by a famous person, you know, if it's launched by Trump >> by several presidents, for example, uh is it legit or not? Or it's still a memecoin that's going to be a scam. And it was two years ago and um some companies uh from casino uh background were actually uh taking this trend immediately and we got uh offered lots of money on promoting those things.
And kind of after several months we realized that something is wrong. And when we um our sellers are selling, you know, for them the the more the better uh obviously we didn't do any tricks with the news and etc. But at some point I started to see like really crazy banners at the website that do not follow our principles and DNA.
Then I started to see that the number of press releases is even bigger and the number of news that we are producing and this is a very bad signal to uh Google as well and we started to decrease the amounts and we started to put the rules. So for uh I don't know 20 news produced there should be not more than five press releases. There should be a balance >> balance it out.
>> Absolutely. But at some point, memecoins started to become real coins and we realized that it's a nogo. >> You have to get out of this.
>> Yeah. And I completely and I think it was a smart move two years ago. We definitely did not make those huge money that others did, but we stopped completely working with several companies uh and we said no to millions of dollars.
So again like the the long-term vision over the short >> because I I realized that it's going to kill the website at some point. It happened two years ago and during this two years it continued to be so so many companies made money. Many news outlets and some sellers from time to time questioned my uh decision saying everybody's making money on that.
Everybody is uh uh okay with that and Google doesn't care but two years later it's still happening. Yeah. Yeah.
I like that you mentioned the clash with the sales team potentially because they have to reach these targets and this was the easy short-term way to do it. So um it's actually quite good that you managed to keep this long-term vision and steer the boat into this direction. Yeah, we we have a pretty solid uh strong uh board of directors uh with very good relationships.
So we can discuss those things and it's always you know the balance and it's not that like fine line between this is black and this is white. It's always like you need to understand if it's harming your future or not. Um so yeah um I think um that's the reason why we kept the stability and the other reason obviously because we are the biggest in the world by coverage we have 26 uh languages and when one language goes up the other goes down and it kind of balances it all and um sometimes it's market volatility sometimes it's political story regulation or whatever I I mean in south in the South Korea which is pretty strong uh in uh our editorial environment um they they go in cycles uh they ban crypto then they start to be more crypto friendly then they got hacked some crypto exchanges getting hacked in South Korea and then they start banning it again and we are adjusting uh here if it's cut uh if the regulation is strict we are cutting the expenses and we are putting our investments into the countries that are growing right now.
>> Yeah, makes sense. Controversial question right now. Um because I think that we've touched upon some points during this episode, but um perhaps a lot of founders and a lot of people are asking themselves this.
So what do you reply to people that are saying that AI is killing media? >> Um I do not in general AI is not killing media. Uh it's the strategy of some of the news outlets that may kill media.
If you are traveling right now with the decreases of traffic uh and you have to decrease you have to cut the costs and uh uh fire some people from editorial. Obviously, the first choice you make is why don't I use AI? But the reality is AI is stupid.
AI is hallucinating. AI is not at the level at least at at the current point that may produce uh content of a good quality without any human uh editing. Uh what is possible to do is to build the optimization strategy which uh not uh killing the editorial in general but supporting the editorial to find the news faster uh to produce the draft of the content faster and then uh to research something to add additional angle.
Uh basically we're kind I'm telling you my analytical soul is always there. Uh we are reviewing right now we are analyzing the amount of uh articles we produce and the cost per article. So during the last year the production of article increased like five times per journalist per uh editor uh and uh the cost of article uh decreased something like seven times.
Okay, that's such a relief to hear because we have a like not like media uh type of content unit in our agency, but we still have like a content unit like with uh several people and not several I would say like 10 people and we also don't use like AI generated content but we're trying to optimize like the preparation of the content like drafts and everything and to decrease the expenses for a content production. Um, so I think I have the last question about like AI and Google search. We have a lot of founders who are listening to our episode and I'm pretty much uh sure that they're curious to know how they can leverage the media content in order to get uh visible in LLMs like in AR tools like chat.
Yeah, everybody interested how >> like uh it h happens the same as with Google. Nobody knows it's algorithm. But there are some uh findings uh that we have uh in being crypto that is uh confirming that we have the right strategy.
uh we are pretty visible uh in uh crypto space in uh chaptt uh in and in perplexity it's pretty volatile but I think uh currently we are on the second position uh out of uh 20 crypton news websites in charge and on the third pos on the first position in perplexity uh yeah and uh Most probably it's uh related to the broad presence of our brand, the stability of our traffic, the the amount of news and educational content that we are producing and obviously the amount of mentions because we have a lot of strategic partners uh who are our long-term friends of the brand. uh plus on top of that uh it's also the trust uh ingredient and all that one of the options to check the trust authority uh is obviously the main authority and the second is trust pilot the or glass node in terms of the company uh culture. So in trust pilot you can check uh what are the feedback from uh readers from users of your product and uh we have a pretty high uh level at trust uh pilot uh rate in trust pilot rating uh in glass node as well and uh we are getting more and more mentions everywhere.
So this is the the core if we are speaking about um companies founders who want to become more visible in um chap for example it means that they need to confirm their trust and to explain their product on constant basis and this is the change of the paradigm right now because what they did previously they do one interview they do one press release they pay some I don't know PR distribution company uh the this company is automatically sending all the press releases to hundreds of shitty websites uh they are giving you a nice looking report that it was mentioned in 100 of articles with super low domain authority and it kind of worked because nobody actually checks if it's of any value but right now it could be clearly seen if you do not have referral do not have any mentions in chat GPT it means that your strategy doesn't work so right now the shift is this if you want to be mentioned in chat GPT you need to work only with strong brands only the with the brands that are considered by Chad GPT or any other LLM as the legit, as the trustworthy, as a reliable. And this is something that's going to grow even further. All the news outlets that looked like blogs that didn't put the investments into their brands during all the previous years, uh, thinking that this altcoin season will stay here forever.
uh unfortunately are in a tough situation right now because you need to invest before you're going to get uh this and we know perfectly the brand is not something that you can build in a second. It takes uh years to actually position yourself perfectly. >> So thank you so much Alona.
Uh we would like to wrap up this interview with flash questions. So basically I'm going to ask you a list of question and I would like you to answer as fast as and and as honestly as possible. Are you ready?
>> Ready. >> Okay. So the three most important qualities for a successful media founder.
>> Uh multitasking, time management and communication skills. >> Okay. Deliver fast and decent or take time to make things perfect.
>> Take time. >> Okay. The biggest Okay.
But uh if you have a hypothesis uh you need to deliver fast MVP, test it before making a long-term strategic decision. >> So it's the combination. >> The one thing that you would tell to all web 3 founders that need to interact with media >> if you could persuade them to do one thing better to improve their brand.
Uh know what you really want and what is the real measure of success of collaborating with media. >> What's the biggest lesson that you learned this year? >> Uh that I'm stronger than I thought.
>> I love this. >> And finally, $100 million or 100 million subscribers. >> Um obviously 100 million subscribers.
I calculated it right now. because it costs more. >> Okay, thank you so much.
It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you. It was a pleasure and thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, I think this was a really really insightful podcast like for people who are working in communications and marketing like because it's really get to um it's really get to get updated information now about like the recent trends in media and also throughout the podcast I was thinking should I ask Alona to be my mentor like business mentor that really means something. Thank you so much for coming. >> Thank you.
It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Enjoy the rest of the conference.
>> Thank you. Bye-bye everyone.
