The media industry is being rebuilt from scratch. Crypto is just the canary.
@dlnews is shutting down.
A few weeks after
@Blockworks closed its newsroom, another serious crypto media company couldn't make its model work.
The DL News team did real, rigorous journalism. I hope everyone lands well.
But the structural problem remains. And it's worth naming it.
There are only two ways to build a "media" business:
Monetise your audience. Or monetise a product.
Most crypto media chose the first path — and most media companies across every sector did the same. It worked — until it didn't.
Audience monetisation has one fatal flaw: it's replicable. And with AI, the barrier to entry is now zero. Anyone can produce content at scale. The commodity trap is complete.
Blockworks understood this.
I've had a great conversation with
@JasonYanowitz about this exact question. They made a strategic pivot — closing the newsroom, doubling down on data, dashboards, and events. They just raised fresh capital at nearly $200 millions valuation. A different product bet. A legitimate one.
At
@TheBigWhale_, we made our own bet — early.
We monetise intelligence products. Briefings, benchmarks, analyst access, and curated events that connect the right people at the right moment. Today, 150 clients — banks, asset managers, fintechs — pay to understand where finance is going.
That model made us profitable in Q1. On track for Q2. With a team of ten and three offices (Geneva, Paris, London).
This is not a new idea.
@Jeff Mancini, CEO of
@arizent_co, articulated it better than anyone in a recent AMO podcast — the shift from information to strategy and market intelligence, and the ability to connect projects and people.
That's exactly the direction we're moving. Less news. More signal. More room in the room.
But here's what I think most people are missing.
We're not just watching a media consolidation. We're watching a redefinition of what a media company is.
A media organisation has always had one job: understand a sector — or the world — and explain it to its clients. Until now, that meant reporters interviewing the market and translating it for readers.
What's coming next is different.
With AI and autonomous agents, a media company can directly interrogate the market — at scale, in real time — and deliver intelligence straight to its community. No intermediary. No latency. The organisation becomes the intelligence layer itself.
At The Big Whale, we're not just observing this shift. We're building inside it. A small team of analysts & agentic systems already in our operations. We are practitioners of the future of finance — not just analysts of it.
That shapes how we think about what comes next for intelligence, distribution, and the role of agentic systems in our own operations.
The media companies that survive won't be the ones that produce the most content.
They'll be the ones that understand the most — and act on it first.