Niche Knowledge #2: Altcoin Daily

By most accounts, crypto is still in a bear market. But not if you’re in the business of doing daily updates on the crypto space.

Niche Knowledge, the series devoted to exploring lucrative business niches that real people have found real success in, next takes a look at the rapidly growing YouTube channel Altcoin Daily.

Overview

This is a channel that I, like many others, discovered around the beginning of the last crypto bull market — roughly late 2020. But since then, the channel is still chugging along nicely.

Altcoin Daily, as the name suggests, uploads daily news recaps, opinions, and interviews with experts about all things cryptocurrency. The channel was started by brothers Aaron and Austin Arnold back in January, 2018. That was back in the depths of the last crypto recession, when Bitcoin fell as low as around $3,400 a coin, and Ethereum was as low as $85. Talk about starting at the “worst” possible time. But like many businesses that become uber successful, Altcoin Daily took advantage of the crypto freeze, and began building its brand.

Since its start the channel has grown to almost 1.3 million subscribers, and become a powerful voice in the crypto space. The brothers have interviewed the likes of Raoul Paul, other popular YouTubers like BitBoy Crypto, Benjamin Cowen, Robert Breedlove, and many others.

Their videos provide not only timely updates, but important context that makes the high-tech crypto world accessible to everyday listeners. They are big crypto investors themselves, and have demonstrated a keen insight into the space, offering neutral, largely hype-free analysis.

Monetization

According to Social Blade, Altcoin Daily currently makes anywhere between an estimated $953 — $15,200 per month, or $11,400 — $182,900 per year, from Adsense.

However, like many crypto channels, Altcoin Daily utilizes affiliate links a great deal, which certainly adds significantly to the site’s bottom line. Affiliate deals include companies like Coinbase, Ledger, and events like Outer Edge and the convention Bitcoin 2023 being held in Miami Beach.

The only merch the channel currently sells is a simple pint glass, through Spring. Typically brands try to hawk t-shirts, hats, and other apparel. But Altcoin Daily seems content with keeping things basic on the merch side.

Altcoin Daily also has a significant following on Twitter that nearly matches its YouTube subscription army. The brand has 1.3 million followers, and tweets out on a daily basis.

Niche Deets

The videos on the channel reliably get tens of thousands of views. Usually ranging between 50k to the low 100k mark. Interestingly, none of their videos have yet to crack the million view mark. Their most watched video is “How Much Cardano (ADA) Do You Need to Become a Cryptocurrency Millionaire in 2021?” featuring Bitboy Crypto, with 726,000 views. This proves you don’t need videos to go viral and get millions of views if you’re trying to make a go of the YouTube game. You just need to pump out content consistently, and let the YT algorithm do its work.

Of course, it helps if you’re in a good niche like cryptocurrency, which is a space that’s only going to grow more over time.

Altcoin Daily’s thumbnails are eye-catching and somewhat clickbaity, making sure to usually include a human face. The YouTube algo tends to like seeing faces in the thumbnail.

The channel’s stats over the last few years tell an interesting story. Here’s a screenshot of a chart from Social Blade:

As you can see, during the end of the last crypto bear market, through the end of 2020, Altcoin Daily experienced steady but largely flat growth. Then when the bull market kicked in demonstrably at the end of the year, and the beginning of 2021, the channel hockey sticked upward. But since the the boom cycle ended, Altcoin Daily has plateaued into its slow and steady rate of growth.

These charts show the strength and the weakness of the crypto news niche. Bear markets are tougher to grow in. Bull markets may be easier to find traction, but they last for briefer periods. So if you’re looking to start a channel or site devoted to cryptocurrency, you’d better be prepared to stick it out for the long haul. Especially now, with the asset class still down, and a looming possible recession and near-certain continued interest rate hikes on the horizon.

From an SEO/keyword angle, a crypto channel gives you the opportunity to rank for brand new coins and tokens just as they’re released, provided you’re staying up to date with the latest news. Imagine if you’re among the first, or even the first, to break a story on a new crypto project. And say that project takes off down the road. You might be the beneficiary of that rising tide, catching some of the traffic that builds off the growth of that project. Nowadays, it’s a tall task to rank for well-known high cap coins. But that doesn’t mean you can’t keyword capture the more niche projects out there before they potentially get big.

Summary

Overall, this a channel I like for its plain, soft-spoken, and reliable uploads. As of now, Altcoin Daily has posted over 2,000 videos. That shows remarkable dedication. But the end result has been a channel that thus far has gained 158 million views, and counting.

While it’s impossible to know exactly how much the channel makes from affiliate sales, between those and Adsense revenue (and sales of pint glasses), it’s not hard to imagine Altcoin Daily making several hundred thousand dollars a year. That’s impressive when you consider that many big news outlets are laying off employees and struggling to even stay afloat. Not bad for two brothers who started a simple channel talking about their favorite topic cryptocurrency just five years ago.