5
13 Comments

From $1K to $1M AR from Crypto Media Company, Ask Me Anything

Hey

I started AMBCrypto back in 2018 with just $1K, we have gone through many ups and downs. We also had only 50K traffic, now we have more than 3M users on our platform every single month.
Now, we are at $1M AR with 30+ employees around the world.

AMBCrypto is a Crypto media company, we provide Crypto specific news in 5 languages including English.

These last 3 years have taught me many things, will love to answer any questions you guys have.

  1. 2

    Do you take on freelancers? If so, what is the rate you are currently paying freelancers when it comes $/per word?

    1. 1

      Our focus is on quality news, so freelancer doesn't work much for us. We tried with few in early days, but you will not get good content, also they can leave anytime, which is a big headache.

      Now, we have team of 20 full time journalist, everyone focus on a specific areas only. This make them expert in this area.

      1. 1

        Interesting - I believe most news/media organizations rely heavily on freelancers, given the high rate of staff turnover. I also haven't heard that hiring freelancers leads to poor quality. What is the avg. pay of a entry-level journalist at AMB and whats the avg. tenure?

        1. 1

          Hiring freelancer make sense, when you have a system to track and keep a record of everyone work or you make it like BuzzFeed.

          Making this type of system and onboarding freelancer who can write like BuzzFeed is a big challenge because at the initial stage, you are not big and freelancer onboarding at cheap rate will be a dificult task.

          With full time journalist, the cost for content is very less than hiring freelancer. It's around $50+

          1. 1

            Thanks for the in-depth answers, Himanshu. Where are most of your journalists located and what was the process like hiring them? Are they assigned stories based on current events or do they do their own, original reporting?

            1. 1

              We have journalist from India, Singapore, USA, Dubai, Italy, Mexico, Seoul.

              In the starting few journalist were hired through LinkedIn then we started getting emails as our brand grew and we then hired some employees through cold email to us.

              But yeah, mostly are through LinkedIn and connections.

              We don't give them stories, we just give one or 2 area we give to them like One can cover legal issues in India and Govt announcement in India. This helps in keeping the focus on few things but not on many

  2. 2
    1. How do you generate money with this website?
    2. Other than Ads any other income stream?
    3. Is it single website? (newbie here) why you called it media company?
    4. How do you generate content for website?

    Wow!! Thats really good milestone. Congrats

    1. 1

      We generate revenue from few streams like

      Sponsored PR
      Banner Ads
      Content License
      Marketing Plan Creation

      Right now, our main source of revenue is ads only.

      Yeah, this is the single website.

      We have 20+ full time journalist to write newsworthy content everyday.

  3. 1

    How did you first get traffic?

    1. 1

      After 3 months, we applied for inclusion in Google news and got approval from Google. This helped a lot to us in getting good amount of traffic in early months.

      Somehow during 2017 Bull run, few of our articles got shared widely in South Korea.

      These things helped us in getting initial traffic.

      After a year, we started partnering with different news aggregator to get more traffic.

      Now, the interesting thing is that most of our traffic is from aggregator .

      1. 2

        What is an example of a news aggregator?

        1. 1

          Like
          NewsNow
          Jio news - One of the biggest news App in India
          Apple News
          Coinmarketcap news section
          Trading View News Section
          And the list goes on till 25+

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments