The media business is tough: Entrepreneurs must navigate fierce competition, fickle tastes, and an audience that expects content to be free. Despite all this, Jason Yanowitz believes he has figured out how to build a profitable media business around the niche of crypto, even at a time when leading rivals have stumbled.
He says the firm he cofounded, Blockworks, is pursuing a growth strategy that is on track to pull in over $30 million in revenue this year, while adding a new business line of selling data in addition to its existing ones of news, events, research, consulting, and podcasts. Since it was founded in 2017, Blockworks has been profitable every year but one.
A natural salesman, Yanowitz touts the integrity of the Blockworks brand, though at times it combines journalism and sales operations in a way frowned upon by traditional media outlets. But even as some may have qualms about its journalistic principles, few would dispute Blockworks is riding high right now—and that it is fast becoming the dominant brand in crypto media.
Like other founders in the industry, Yanowitz’s ties to crypto are personal. While living in Eastern Europe in 2015, he spent time with Hungarian friends whose parents had seen their savings destroyed by government misrule, and become enamored with the idea of a self-sovereign currency: Bitcoin.
While the appeal of Bitcoin was intuitive in Eastern Europe, Yanowitz discovered this was not the case when he returned to the U.S. Working as a venture capitalist, he sought to sell the ideals of crypto to institutions. It did not go well. “I got laughed out of the room every time I brought up crypto,” he recalls.
At this juncture, he says he realized that, if the traditional finance world was going to take crypto seriously, he needed to build a media brand that felt familiar to those that Wall Street knew already. Yanowitz then launched Blockworks with cofounder Mike Ippolito, beginning with conferences where bankers and crypto entrepreneurs could meet on the same level.
The business got off to a promising start, but after the pandemic decimated Blockworks’ revenue by 82%, the founders moved to diversify with podcasts. The decision paid off as Yanowitz says the company’s roster of podcasts notched 21 million downloads last year, and became part of a larger flywheel of crypto-focused events, research, and a news website. He boasts Blockworks doesn’t spend a dime on marketing and has “reverse CAC” (an acronym for customer acquisition costs).
Some of Blockworks’ journalistic choices, though, raise eyebrows. Those include charging speakers to appear onstage at its conferences: A rate card viewed by Fortune shows that speaking slots range from around $20,000 to appear on a panel to over $100,000 to be the exclusive guest at a fireside chat. While such arrangements are not unheard of in some corners of the media industry, they go against traditional norms since they give rise to conflict of interest concerns, and are derided by some as “pay to play.”
Meanwhile, a former Blockworks employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said journalists at the company were dismayed that podcast guests have been given the option to excise portions of the recordings before they are released—a practice more in keeping with public relations than journalism.
Yanowitz defended the paid stage appearances by saying they account for no more than 20% of conference programming, and that the opportunity was only available to a small pool of credible companies. He added that podcasts had only been edited on five occasions, and that this opportunity had only been offered to financial firms that would otherwise have declined to be interviewed.
Yanowitz also emphasized that Blockworks’ editorial operations, numbering 15 people in a staff of 85, are independent and that audience trust is foundational to its business strategy. The former employee confirmed that the Blockworks’ cofounders did not interfere in the day-to-day decisions of the news side.
Yanowitz displays a passion bordering on obsession typical of startup founders. When he is not on the ground at the company’s Manhattan office or at its conferences across the country, he is constantly online, talking up the virtues of crypto to a large following on X.
“I would not bet against Yano, who is a very smart guy,” says Josh Quittner, founder of competing crypto media brand, Decrypt, which has been quick to adopt cutting-edge technologies like AI and prediction markets in its news operations.
Decrypt appears on solid footing, but other crypto brands have encountered recent headwinds. That includes Coindesk, an industry fixture since 2013 that has been roiled by a recent controversy that saw its owners force editors to take down an article about billionaire Justin Sun, leading to firings and resignations in the newsroom. Meanwhile, Coindesk announced it would move its flagship conference from Austin to Toronto for 2025. The decision to shift venues appears to have been in response to the tough regulatory climate in the U.S.—but one that now seems less strategic in light of a pro-crypto shift in Washington, D.C.
Coindesk’s decision to move its main event to Canada comes as another big media brand, Messari, appears to have pulled the plug on Mainnet, a major crypto event in New York City. For Blockworks, whose own events have grown in popularity—the most recent featured a video address from President Donald Trump—these developments offer an opportunity to consolidate its influence. Coindesk and Messari did not reply to a request for comment.
Even as Blockworks remains best known for its events and podcasts, Yanowitz believes it will be the company’s newest business—data—that will become its biggest moneymaker. The service is an add-on to the firm’s existing Blockworks Research service, and comes with a total price tag of $4,500 for an annual license. Yanowitz says Blockworks boosted the price from $2,500 owing to hefty demand, which he says came from institutional customers looking for the crypto equivalent of Bloomberg financial data.
Blockworks is hardly the first media company that has sought to boost revenue with a data business, nor is Yanowitz the first to aspire to be Bloomberg—whose terminal and messaging service, which costs around $35,000 a year, is the envy of every other media outlet.
Yanowitz, though, says Blockworks’ data service can succeed in a way other crypto firms’ offerings have not by supplying financial institutions with familiar metrics. He claims widely touted metrics in crypto—such as “total value locked” on a blockchain or active addresses—are highly gameable, and so are not particularly useful. Blockworks, in his view, offers more practical tools based on real-world financial and user activity.
“There’s a reason that the information the whole industry trades on is based on narratives, and it’s because the good data is lacking,” says Yanowitz. “If you are a … hedge fund, venture firm, sovereign wealth fund of a big country, and you are buying something like Solana or Arbitrum, you need the data behind it, and that data was lacking until Blockworks came around.”
Yanowitz added that major institutions will have the option to obtain data on Blockworks, or else use APIs to integrate the data with their in-house platforms. He also noted that recent advances in AI have dramatically lowered the cost of building a data service, and that Blockworks Research is the company’s fastest growing business segment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
