Crypto news site CCN shuts down due to Google algorithm changes

According to an announcement on their website, top cryptocurrency media site CCN is shutting down today, June 10th. CCN started six years ago, initially going by the name CryptoCoinNews before being revamped into its current form.

The announcement was via a post, written by Jonas Borchgrevink, Founder and Director of CCN Markets and Hawkfish AS. The post emphasized on the scene around the fallout and states that the reason behind the closure is a huge drop off in traffic from Google searches following a June 3 Google Core Update. A whopping 71% traffic of the website from mobile devices fell overnight, writes Borchgrevink.

Borchgrevink notes that they were able to survive after traffic levels being low in the past. However, the addition of new members to the team ensures that they can no longer operate under these conditions on advertiser revenue. CoinDesk saw a 34.6% drop based on the post cites data from Sistrix.com. However, data shows that Cointelegraph did not, in fact, see a drop in traffic following the June update contradictory to the initial reports from CCN. In the post, Borchgrevink mentioned that the British tabloid The Daily Mail has seen a large drop in visibility.  This means that not just crypto sites are affected. Social media and online communities have blamed the clickbait headlines to be the reason behind the loss of visibility for The Daily Mail, which reportedly lost half of its organic website traffic.

Borchgrevink states that the current CCN team will be relocated to HVY.com, a news platform for journalists.

A recovery attempt

However, the announcement also states that the reasoning behind certain sites losing visibility is not able to be determined:

“Unless someone – anyone – who actually worked on the June 2019 Core Update at Google explains what is going on, all we can do is to ‘guess, speculate, and experiment’ as far as our bank accounts allow us to.”

Borchgrevink said in his post:

“If Google thinks that CCN, all of a sudden — remember, literally overnight —, is bad, then why not give us the chance to understand the why and give us a way to change before any major update. Instead, we are kicked in the teeth overnight with zero knowledge of what we have done wrong, impacting a team of 60+ people. 6 years of work is evaporated.”

CCN’s post ends in an optimistic way as they are trying to stay ahead of the update and recover from the damage. They have a list of demands to Google, including giving three month’s notice containing the expected changes from Google Core Updates and asking them to explain what a company can do to stay ahead of the update and to mitigate the damage if it falls into a risk zone for losing traffic.

In an age where everything is digital and reliant on the internet the sheer power of search engines to control the way in which people think is a growing concern. Google dominates the search engine space and its algorithm can control who sees what. Scenarios like these are eye-openers to the idea of conservation of democratical rights across the web.

The post ends by stating the need for having national governments create apolitical task forces to inspect search engine updates for ensuring the conservation of democracy including, Freedom of Speech Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Information.
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