A news industry ripe for disruption

Over the past decade, the news industry has stagnated. The “Facebook and Google are killing our business model” explanation has become a mantra for an industry that has failed time and again to find a response to disruptively competitive new digital advertising models. Google and Facebook now dominate online marketing, earning over 50 percent of total revenue, and now even publishers who can grow readership rapidly are not able to reach profitability.

By bringing together cloud-based publishing and big data technology, plus the innovation engine of cryptocurrency and the Blockchain, PressCoin plans to change this story. By raising $100 mln in its ICO and then growing at a disruptively fast pace, PressCoin intends to provide real competition to the platform giants in the news space within five years.

PressCoin (NEWS) utility token market growth projections

A new crypto-token (NEWS) will be used as the native currency inside PressCoin’s publisher and platform ecosystem. Publishers will be able to trade in content, traffic, and advertising using NEWS. They will also be able to sell subscriptions using the token. Readers will be able to earn tokens by providing value to the network through activities such as contributions, moderation and commerce, creating a golden circle of wealth creation for a beleaguered industry.

PressCoin’s market size modeling is based on three metrics: Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), Gross Domestic Product (GDP equivalent) and growth in monthly active users (MAU) across the network of platforms and publishers within the PressCoin ecosystem.

PressCoin begins using the size of the global news media and advertising economy, estimated to be between $700 bln and $1 tln in size.

Using the lower number, PressCoin estimates in its first year it will grow the NEWS Crypto Economy to represent 0.01 percent, or 1/10,000th of this global turnover, i.e. $70 mln in sales transactions executed in NEWS. “We start small. But as they say, well begun is half done,” PressCoin says in its blog revealing how it came up with the numbers.

“With this small start in 2018, with new platforms being launched and new media properties choosing to become part of the PressCoin ecosystem, we see the standard network effect starting to take hold, and acceleration of the economy starts. The YoY growth has been modeled on factual data: early years of growth at many of the social networks extrapolated for the starting systems we already have in place.”

By the end of its fifth year in 2022, the model estimates GMV will have grown to $33 bln. To get from here to its $100 bln GDP figure, the model assumes the market’s money velocity multiplier will rise from two to three over the course of the five years.

Restarting news industry wealth creation

PressCoin’s shared platform infrastructure, plus extensions, will provide the news industry with access to a set of PressCoin NEWS token based markets. These markets will be used to buy and sell all the inputs and outputs of digital media businesses: including content, traffic, advertising, subscriptions and services.

The ICO promoters say this will encourage growth in several ways:

PressCoin’s shared cloud-based publishing infrastructure will provide network publishers with more cost-effective, data-centric, omnichannel, growth-friendly solutions than they would be able to build for themselves easily and economically.

A higher quality, more engaged social news experience will build a shared pool of logged in users for publishers who choose to integrate with the PressCoin ecosystem. The deep ethical data resources sitting behind a shared user base will enable more efficient and reader-friendly ways to sell products and advertising.

Holding all of this together, NEWS token based internal markets will provide publishers the ability to trade effortlessly in content and traffic - growing the lifeblood of digital publishing together, as well as to motivate and reward their most valuable readers.

After an initial period focusing on platform and market development, PressCoin plans to accelerate growth by providing existing publishers access to its publishing technology solutions and markets. Powered by Quintype’s AWS-for-media developer cloud, these data-first technologies were originally built by PressCoin designer and serial entrepreneur Amit Rathore in his previous startup.

A fully liquid crypto-fiat currency

PressCoin’s market alliance with CointypeX.com, a new Swiss bank-powered crypto exchange, will enable native NEWS transactions to occur at minimal cost in a full range of fiat currencies. Market participants will be able to convert to the fiat currency of their choice in real-time, transparently and seamlessly.

This deeply embedded native cryptocurrency financial services infrastructure will enable PressCoin’s organic liquidity to grow rapidly.

A quick glance at price volume graphs for all the major cryptocurrencies shows there is a clear correlation between the volume of trading and value of tokens. The PressCoin approach to disrupting the news publishing business will be optimised to grow the size of the PressCoin denominated market and thereby deliver value to all participants in the PressCoin ecosystem, including token-holders.

PressCoin’s ICO opened on Dec. 11th and runs until Jan. 22nd.