Nate Whitehill on building CryptoSlate into a trusted crypto news brand

0:00I'm Ashlyn Addison from event chain for investmentpitch media and FinTech news network and today on blockchain interviews we have Nate white Hill the co-founder of crypt of slate Nate thank you so much for being on the show it's a pleasure to have you here today for having me you're very welcome I'm eager to learn a little bit about crypto slate your

0:19platform for delivering cryptocurrency and blockchain news first of all could you give the story to the users on why did you start crypto slate and what was the goal that you were trying to bring to the industry sure so I've been a software developer for over a decade and I got into the cryptocurrency space in 2015 by 2017 I decided I wanted to work

0:42in the space full-time previously I'd helped a lot of other organizations set up kind of news and media businesses so I had the skills as a developer and also the understanding of the media side and interest in cryptocurrency so I started crypto slate in August of 2017 I've been operating now for over two years and the goal is to provide objective daily news and we also have a

1:07data platform as well we list around 2,400 different crypto currencies and we have a company product and people directory as well that's amazing there's so much going on in the blockchain industry right now and there's so many different ways you could approach a new site right there's applications there's development as you're saying there's tons of

1:28development going on there's the updates for all of the different blockchain projects and coins that are going on there's mining and then there's the crypto trading in the markets and the technical analysis so many different things you know what are you guys trying to focus on currently and is that working for you guys yeah so our daily objective is to put out unique

1:48compelling articles about the crypto currency and blockchain space so unlike a lot of our competitors we really go for a quality over quantity approach we definitely try to publish high-quality well sourced interesting entertaining articles and that's worked out really well as far as growing the the traffic organically over the past two years we organically built about a million

2:11backlinks for crypto slave we've been sourced by Wall Street Journal New York Times Seattle Times tons debate organizations ultimately with the goal of just providing objective interesting entertaining content on a daily basis that's great and a million backlinks sounds like quite a bit so could work on that so far I won one interesting factor that new sites tend to get into is the

2:35education right this this space is fairly technical and it's quite new still are you guys focusing on educational content or do you see viewers coming that are just starting to learn about cryptocurrency and blockchain or are you more catered to more advanced or you know novice users yeah I would say we definitely try to cater to both one way in which we do

2:56that is we have a glossary that's built into the site so if you're reading a news article for the first time and you see a term you may not understand it'll automatically put a great kind of dotted line under that link and if you hover over it a lot it'll then explain what that term is so most of the the way in which we present content I would say is

3:20definitely catered towards a more advanced user but with the directory as well that's something that because we have directory of coins companies people products were able to provide meta information for every single article so you'll notice that as you scroll down read news on crypto slate on the sidebar we display the people the products companies mentioned in that article so

3:44you can easily learn more about any particular you know person or company mentioned in any crypto slate article that's great it's almost turning into like a Wikipedia where you can network between people and projects and things like that yeah exactly we definitely try to you know the news is the most important thing for us so we really want to get out quality interesting news

4:06first but other than that we try to provide enough of the supplementary information about any given you know news topic that someone may read our crypto sway mmm-hmm that's great and there's so much crypto news coming out that you know I could see how you guys would be busy even on a daily basis there seems to be it's almost like it's hard to keep up and if you if you don't

4:27see then you probably aren't looking hard enough so what are some interesting or huge news stories that you guys have broken in the recent times here a lot of the stuff that's coming out of China now it's very interesting v1 as most people know it's probably one of the best sources for China info so we try to follow kind of the thought leaders in the crypto space and then you know based

4:51off what they say we produce a lot of articles so we started to get into doing more original research in-house for example a few months ago there's a big Els exploit that we actually covered we were the first I covered the stig exploit and Dan Larimer and some of the other u.s. block one guys are actually you know tweeting about that and referencing the article that we wrote

5:14which is pretty in-depth as far as you know explaining it from a technical point of view so we definitely try to cover things as much as possible try to cover original news but a lot of the time we are just kind of basing the the news coverage based off what other thought leaders in the States are already saying yeah definitely it's great to have those researchers and to

5:33be able to break the news first especially when the crypto markets are 24/7 and time is always flying and the news can you know change overnight when you go to sleep and all of a sudden China has done something and now bitcoins up 40 percent in a day as we've seen you know last month which was crazy so speaking of having more researchers what's you guys's team like right now

5:55where are you based and how many people and is it growing right now I'm based in Seattle Washington most of our writers are distributed around the world so joseph young for example splits his time between Hong Kong and Korea Ally he works out of Barcelona we have writers out of who are from New Zealand currently living in Vietnam the plan is actually to relocate

6:20everyone to London next year London you may may be well aware just recently surpassed New York and San Francisco for a total number of FinTech VC deals and there's just so much happening in London ecosystem companies like skew which is a data analytics company just raised two million dollars or you have it bitstamp there you have revolute which is one of the biggest spin tech

6:45banks mom's oh there's just a lot happening in London so we'll be relocating there sometime in q1 2020 that's great and yes Southeast Asia and now Europe seem to be growing rapidly in their interest in cryptocurrency so that's an interesting strategy that you guys have no speaking of strategies could you talk a little bit about what's you guys a strategy for acquiring users

7:07and are you going to be targeting London and the Europe area as you continue to grow on for the viewership or is it more of a global well yeah so right now we get the majority of our web traffic from Europe and Asia about 65 percent of our traffic comes from there actually being on the Pacific time zone is a little bit of a problem because we get the majority

7:30of our web traffic between midnight and 6:00 a.m. Pacific time so that means you know we constantly have to coordinate about what articles go out and how do we stay fresh with with the news cupboards as you know and said it's it's a 24/7 kind of you know global operation so I would say for the most part Europe and Asia have been our kind of hubs that we

7:50targeted as far as news but you know and it's funny to say that the United States is kind of an afterthought in this whole blockchain revolution yeah well we'll see how you know I think a lot of its to do with the impression that people see in the media and the regulations and stuff so we'll see how each country takes those progressive steps forward

8:10and it seems that quite a few countries in Southeast Asia at least I know are very progressive on the industry and I think that that's helping it move forward which is great because there's a lot of value to be had now with you guys expanding and you're moving to London could you talk a little bit about the revenue generation and sources for crypto slate do you guys do sponsored

8:31articles or advertisements or do you guys have other products that you have available for you know VIP members and stuff how are you guys getting revenue and creating a sustainable business yeah so far most of our revenue has been generated off advertising we have been kind of experimenting with different premium subscription models so we launched something called crypto slave

8:50research a few months ago and crypto slate research is a paid service or actually pausing it for the I'm being as we revamp it we're going to come out with a new service called crypto slate plus it'll be which will be at an even lower price point it'll basically give people access to some of the more exclusive articles and also hide ads from them as well and we're

9:11also building out a new kind of pro feature set for crypto slate that will probably probably be announced sometime in the next three to six months but really trying to balance between the advertising side which is kind of the lowest hanging fruit with directory listings is another big one for us we have these incredible beautiful directories for companies products

9:35people so doing things like you know charging for listings and premium listings one thing that's extremely important to us and disclosure in advertising so I'm sure you're aware that a lot of companies they like to you know or they try to pay extra to remove the disclosure tag in the United States that's illegal by the Federal Trade Commission standards all ads have to be

10:00disclosed so you take disclosure very seriously just from a legal standpoint but also in the interests of our readers too you know we always want to provide as objective and kind of transparent in our reporting as possible whether it's writing a news story or showing an advertisement so the closure is something that we require on any single any single dollar that we take money to

10:23show something for definitely definitely and I'm glad you guys are doing that so as you continue to grow what obstacles do you foresee you know will be a challenge to overcome in the near future our challenges for the business or challenges for crypto in general well for crypto slate and this does apply to the industry as well um I would definitely say you know there's a lot of

10:50really good kind of crypto media and research outlets now so trying to be competitive just as far as getting news out quickly covering interesting information we actually internally use this code that I came up with to kind of to simplify what is good content and ofc if those original fresh and compelling that that's the goals for any particular article that you know gets good views is

11:16that it's something that's an original take meaning it's not just a rehash of an existing story some sort of original analysis being fresh in the news cycle so that means you know if we are covering or kind of jumping on another story we're doing it as quickly as possible in the new cycle as opposed to waiting you know 8 to 12 hours and obviously the compelling part

11:36something that's interesting entertaining people care about a lot of that has to do with what projects we're talking about so anything in the top 15 I would say you know has big enough communities that'd be kind of the traffic organically goes to those particular articles about particular projects that's great I love that and it's great to jump on to the large

11:56cryptocurrency communities and get their support because it's easy to tap into a community that you know II Oh sand etherium and Bitcoin just have huge communities but there's actually a lot of other up-and-coming projects that if you can be the one to break the news on them first and that's also very important so that's great so as you guys continue to expand what is crypto slate

12:16most interested in acquiring are you guys looking for more strategic partnerships are you guys looking to hire more people or you're just looking for more viewership and more subscriptions oh yeah I would say right now our our main focus is on just growing the business organically so you know putting out interesting articles that are spread virally that get good

12:37discoverability and search and in social media but that's definitely a huge part of it when we are looking for kind of bigger companies well-known brands to partner with on advertising opportunities so right now for example we're working with bi bit and Celsius that kind of strategic integrations of you know their current offerings so companies that you know have good

13:02reputation that have been been around long enough they have value to provide back to our readers for example we don't you don't advertise any icos or ideas that's just too much of a risk you know as you know 99% of the ICO or ieo projects are down 99% it's really kind of a you know the top people are basically dumping on the retail so we can't get behind any sort of advertising

13:28despite that there still seems to be a lot of money that does want to advertise those sort of projects mm-hmm definitely and if there's people that are interested in following crypto slate or just learning more on getting involved what's the best way for them to reach out check out crypto slate.com or you can go on Twitter and follow us I quit DOS late I can also direct message me on

13:50telegram I just script Oh Slade awesome thank you so much Nate for the for your time I'll leave those links in the description box below that's all the time we have for this interview but I really appreciate hearing about crypto slate and doing grats on your growth so far and I'm looking forward to following up in the near future thanks so much acid appreciate it