Crypto news players left red faced as Breaker publishes pay to play findings

Breaker recently went undercover to see if crypto news outlets would take money and pass sponsored articles off as legitimate journalistic content. More than half those contacted said yes.

“On the assumption that most outlets would not openly admit that they took bribes for coverage if asked directly by a journalist, it seemed reasonable to set up an undercover investigation on the topic,” the online publication says.

It created a fake email account, and claimed to be representing a PR company. There was no fake website or domain associated; it was simply a Gmail address with a profile picture found by image searching “Russian actor.” (Nikolay Kostarev, a Moscow-based PR agent).

Breaker reached out to 28 sites. Out of the 22 outlets who replied conclusively, 12 of them were willing to publish paid content without disclosing it as such.

Among them, Bitcoinist and NewsBTC are high traffic websites, and regularly rank in the top Google results as news sources when searching for content related to Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. Bitcoinist claims to have more than two million visitors a month; NewsBTC says it has 1.5 million visitors a month.

Both quoted an extra premium on top of the cost of sponsored article publication to publish it outside of the “sponsored” category, essentially presenting a press release under the guise of legitimate journalistic content.

“It’s come to my attention that one of our sales team has mistakenly suggested that we could publish content without disclosure that it has been paid for (i.e. a sponsored article) to one of your undercover reporters posing as a PR agent. This is not our policy,” Samuel Rae, CEO of NewsBTC, responded.

“The sales executive offering this has been removed from our company active immediately and won’t be dealing with/offering our advertising (or otherwise) services again, be it to a PR company, a reseller or anyone else.”

Cointelegraph

Also of note was the response from Cointelegraph, one of the biggest players in the crypto news industry.

“In researching this story, a source suggested that Cointelegraph would accept payment to place articles that weren’t marked as sponsored, but in my correspondence with a representative of the site this didn’t seem to be the case,” says Breaker.

“But, instead of discouraging ‘Nikolay’ from seeking to pay for coverage, a member of the business team was happy to point us towards some sites in the Cointelegraph Media Group that did. (The Group is an advertising partnership, allowing marketers to coordinate ads or sponsored posts across member sites, although in other respects the sites are editorially independent).”

Cointelegraph had not responded to a request for comment as Breaker went to press.

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