To understand what's driving these efforts, we spoke with Outset PR founder Mike Ermolaev. According to him, exchanges are actively adapting to a fundamentally different traffic environment: Google evolves, LLMs grow as a new discovery channel, and competition gets more fierce.
So information is taking on a very different role. It's no longer just a branding asset. It's emerging as one of the primary ways businesses attract, hold, and eventually convert future users.
Exchanges have to rethink user growth
The rise of exchange-owned content isn't the result of a single problem. Different formats meet different business needs.
- News aggregators are primarily a SEO play. By republishing industry coverage, exchanges can capture organic search visibility at scale. Think of MEXC, which frequently ranks above original publications in Google. And the fact that nearly every major exchange brand has adopted a similar model means it consistently delivers results.
- Educational pieces, including guides and explainers, have long been considered evergreen articles capable of attracting organic demand for years. Today, almost every exchange platform follows the same strategy, making it far more difficult to gain a competitive advantage through this approach alone.
- Research and analytics might focus less on traffic and more on audience trust. Unlike standard news coverage, they explain why events matter rather than simply reporting them, which contributes to long-term authority and relationship building.
During previous cycles, the success of an exchange depended largely on acquiring as many new users as possible. However, the latest memecoin frenzy, failed presales, and a prolonged bear market created a new challenge. The market has matured, user growth has stalled over the past 18 months, competition for organic traffic has intensified, and brands increasingly have to earn trust before they can earn conversions.
Attention is where the funnel begins
The immediate value of owned content doesn’t immediately show up in trading volume. Still, it can be measured in attention received.
Someone searching Google, asking ChatGPT, or prompting Claude for market news isn't necessarily looking for an exchange platform. They're looking for information. If a company consistently shows up during that discovery phase, it gains something valuable as well: the first interaction with a future customer.
Through the ongoing research that supports our LLM Seeding service, we've observed that exchange-owned news aggregators appear in AI-generated answers more frequently, reinforcing their role as an early discovery touchpoint rather than simply another source of coverage.
Over time, that repeated exposure familiarizes people with the product itself. They recognize the brand and start associating it with meaningful insights long before they ever consider opening an account. Finally, they learn to navigate the interface. Converting that audience into active users is a separate job, but without the initial traffic, that opportunity never exists.
This is where many exchange businesses leave room for improvement. Simply attracting readers isn't enough. The real power lies in designing the flow that gradually moves occasional visitors from consuming information to exploring the product ecosystem.
That's also why news sections shouldn't be viewed as retention tools only. Existing customers rarely come back to read headlines before placing a trade. News aggregators operate much earlier in the funnel, introducing the brand to people who may not have intended to interact with it at all.
Exchanges don’t seek to build media empires
Per Mike, direct communication channels have always been one of the core user growth mechanisms for exchanges. X, Reddit, and Discord allow brands to maintain community relationships without relying entirely on journalists, influencers, or other intermediaries. Owned content hubs are just another extension of that strategy.
At their core, exchanges remain exchanges. Their ultimate goal isn't to compete with publishers or build newsrooms for their own sake. Instead, they're trying more ways to reach, educate, and retain users.
Most aggregators don't produce original reporting. Instead, they collect stories from BeInCrypto, CoinGape, and dozens of other publishers, making them easier to discover through Google and LLMs.
The same distinction applies to corporate blogs. While a newsroom aims to inform the widest possible audience, they are designed to drive organic search traffic around specific topics and ultimately guide readers toward the company's products or services.
When reflecting on why exchanges aren't engaged in a direct battle with crypto publishers, Mike puts it like this: "Publishers monetize attention itself. Exchanges monetize what happens after that attention turns into a customer relationship."
The next SEO battle has already started
For years, SEO was mostly about optimizing individual pages. Companies competed for rankings by targeting high-volume keywords, publishing evergreen articles, and building backlinks. That approach is no longer enough.
Search engines now evaluate whether a website is a credible source, not just whether a single page deserves to rank. The same applies to AI-powered discovery, where visibility depends not only on traditional SEO signals but also on topical authority and the breadth of media coverage.
From what we observe in our work with clients, the final goal is moving away from chasing individual queries toward establishing long-term reputation. Rather than producing isolated pieces of content, businesses are investing in entire information ecosystems: news aggregators that capture breaking developments, educational resources that support topical depth, and original research that demonstrates expertise.
Why this changes partnerships, not PR
Traditional PR outreach is designed to earn editorial coverage. Partnerships with publisher-owned hubs involve cross-promotion, editorial collaborations, reciprocal linking, or other initiatives that benefit both sides.
That’s why brands are interested not only in where an article is published, but also which news feeds or media environments it may reach. This isn't necessarily a challenge for communications teams. More often, it evolves into an integrated PR and business development task.
Two paths, one destination
Predicting what today's crypto exchanges will look like in the future is difficult. What already seems clear, though, is that these platforms are following two distinct strategies.
- Some are becoming strictly specialized, doing one thing exceptionally well.
- Others are expanding into broader ecosystems that serve many different customer needs.
Binance is perhaps the clearest example of the second strategy, continuously adding new products, services, and information layers around its core trading business.
Neither model is inherently better. A focused product can dominate a particular niche, while larger players have the resources to test new ideas, analyze audience behavior at scale, and continuously improve their capabilities.
But content fits naturally into both visions. It allows brands to nurture relationships before someone is ready to trade – and remain relevant long after the first transaction.
