There Is No Web3 Media

An investigative deep dive into Web3’s press economy, the incentives sustaining it, and how weak verification and paid syndication are reshaping the credibility layer of crypto media.

It may look like a newsroom. Underneath, it’s a blog pretending to host journalism.

Disclosure: This is editorial analysis based on publicly available reporting, our published research, and direct clarification obtained in follow-up conversations with parties involved (not reproduced here). A consolidated list of references and notes will appear at the end.

Inside the Syndication Machine That Keeps Web3 Marketing Broken

Jump to: What crypto press releases really sell · The accountability vacuum · The “62%” study · Retractions & incentives · The LLM experiment

Almost 30 days ago, my team and I set out with an AEO specialty agency to run an experiment.

The goal was not just to rank for low-competition queries inside LLM search. It was to correct the record. At the time, Google’s AI summaries were repeating vendor marketing claims that Web3 press releases “work” — confident language built on legacy sales copy, not verifiable outcomes.

We already had first-party data from last year that showed the opposite. In 99.5% of cases we reviewed, press release distribution produced no meaningful discoverability, no measurable impact, and no durable value. So we published the facts and tracked whether the system would change its mind. Within days, the summaries began shifting away from a confident “yes” and toward “probably not.” We were close.

Partway through, the surrounding conversation shifted. A PR agency published its own study, pushed a headline number, and distributed it aggressively across major crypto blogs and platforms. The agency’s intent was their organizations promotion, not defending press releases. But the way the headline and the ‘38% credible’ bucket were interpreted by LLM summaries helped resurrect the vendor narrative. The volume and authority of that coverage also changed how the topic was weighted and surfaced. In background discussions, the authors largely agreed with our critique of press release value. The unintended consequence was that the distribution footprint itself tipped our experiment back toward the original, vendor-friendly default.

The headline claim was that roughly 62% of crypto press releases were linked to “scam” companies. It traveled fast, and it syndicated cleanly into major crypto outlets. The immediate problem was not the existence of risk in the market; it was what the number implied. LLM summaries treated the remaining ~38% as evidence that press releases have legitimacy, even though the authors were not claiming that press releases work as a marketing channel.

In follow-up conversations, the authors clarified the methodology: the classification was based on on-chain flags and automated risk warnings, projects without a token or chain footprint were effectively excluded, and unknowns were often given the benefit of the doubt. That is a narrower, weaker claim than the syndicated coverage suggested. Yet publications that market themselves as “news” repeated the headline without forcing those definitions into the first paragraph. That is not journalism. It is blogging.

Weeks later, reports began surfacing that multiple crypto outlets were retracting or quietly removing their versions of the story. That is when we jumped back in, because it stopped being only about press releases. It became a story about what crypto media appears to depend on to survive: revenue from hosting and syndicating paid releases. If your readership is not large enough to fund the operation through CPMs alone, the wire pipeline becomes a line item you do not threaten.

Look closely and the press release economy is not merely ineffective. It is structurally compromised — and in many cases it appears to be propping up the balance sheets of outlets that market themselves as “crypto press.”

What Crypto Press Releases Really Sell

In most industries, a press release is a footnote: a document companies publish for the record, and journalists either ignore or interrogate. In crypto, it became a product.

This isn’t PR in the traditional sense. It isn’t relationship building, earned coverage, or reputational work. It is a paid distribution package that claims to mimics legitimacy — a form of authority laundering that shows up elsewhere in Web3 credibility theatre. Not our study has failed to find evidence of a single release in the sample window last year that did generate any authority. It is snake oil.

The newswire’s pitch is simple: pay a vendor, send your announcement across a network of crypto sites, and walk away with a list of placements you can screenshot and a strip of logos you can paste onto your homepage.

Just because it glows doesn’t mean it isn’t snake oil. Web3 press releases have no commercial value, and there is no need for them.

That is the first lie the system trains companies to believe: that distribution is credibility.They wont offer stastically significate numbers to back this up. They just say look who else bought this and they are right a lot of companies fall for this scam wasting their investors money on this artcivity that has 0 value yield.

The second lie is that the buyers are paying for journalism.

They aren’t.

They are paying for syndication. It is a commercial pathway that many crypto publications quietly depend on, and few are incentivized to scrutinize. A press release arrives as pre-written copy, gets posted as-is, and sits somewhere on a site alongside actual reporting. Sometimes it is labeled. Sometimes it is not, it is rarely linked from anywhere meaningful as this content hurts the site it lives on google reputation. The result is a blurred boundary between news and paid placement, presented to founders as “coverage.” The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has warned that sponsored content can be deceptive when it is difficult for readers to distinguish from editorial material (FTC, Native Advertising, 2015).

One reason this matters is that the crypto “wire” market is not large. There are only a handful of dominant distribution vendors, which means a small number of players can shape a disproportionate amount of what gets presented as “coverage”. In reality, the underlying pages are often releases buried in sub-directories and rarely discovered again.

We’ve been openly critical of one of the most visible firms, Chainwire, because in our view the model is predatory: it prices “value” into a product that is difficult to audit, then asks buyers to trust reach claims without receipts. That critique is grounded in our earlier breakdown of the Web3 press release scam. If Chainwire believes we’re wrong, we’re happy to retract. All we ask is that they publicly justify the outcomes they sell. Show evidence a modern marketing team would recognize, including attribution, real readership signals, and verifiable downstream impact.

This is where the machine becomes more than a marketing tactic. It becomes an industry habit.

Web3 is full of teams that talk like insurgents: anti-bank, anti-establishment, pro-transparency, yet they build businesses that behave like the systems they claim to replace. They spend aggressively on narrative. They spend loosely on optics. They spend almost nothing on provable distribution outcomes.

And yes, that money is real.

And in many cases, it is not even the founders’ money. It is investor capital, raised on the promise of building something real, then spent on vanity distribution that enriches the syndication supply chain more reliably than it grows the project.

It’s founders’ capital, venture capital, and often retail liquidity routed through tokens. Whatever the source, it is a finite pool. A meaningful portion of it goes into vanity marketing that cannot be audited.

Press releases are one of the cleanest examples because the product is intentionally hard to measure. Vendors will cite “impressions,” “reach,” and “visibility,” but rarely provide what modern marketing treats as basic: attribution, conversion tracking, search performance, or even a clear explanation of who actually read the thing.

The incentives are easy to understand:

• Vendors make money selling distribution.
• Publications make money hosting it.
• Agencies make money bundling it.
• Founders get something they can point at.

Everybody gets paid. Nobody gets the truth.

This is why we started pulling at the thread. Not because press releases are the biggest scam in Web3, but because they are a neat, visible symptom of something deeper: an ecosystem that struggles to produce sustainable revenue, yet remains unusually skilled at manufacturing the appearance of momentum — what we’ve elsewhere described as product theatre.

The Accountability Vacuum

The core defense of crypto press releases is always the same: visibility.

Ask vendors what clients are paying for and the answer will orbit around reach, impressions, brand lift, and exposure. What is rarely provided is anything that resembles modern performance accountability.

Part of why this works is semantic. The sales language blurs terms that sound similar but mean very different things:

• Coverage vs placement — editorial judgment versus paid hosting.
• Distribution vs discoverability — being uploaded somewhere versus being found.
• Impressions vs readership — a counted exposure versus a verified human audience.
• Visibility vs attribution — being seen versus proving impact.
• PR vs press releases — reputational work versus a transactional content drop.

Start with search.

In traditional digital marketing, visibility means discoverability. Pages index. Links pass authority. Content ranks. Traffic compounds over time. Press release syndication in crypto does none of this. Most placements sit on subdomains, temporary pages, or sections that are either noindexed, buried, or structurally disconnected from the publication’s primary authority. Google itself documents how a noindex directive prevents pages from appearing in Search.

Like print newspapers, no one will ever see your Web3 press release.

In plain terms: they do not build durable search equity.They only build revenue for their supply chain

In some cases, the downside is worse than “no benefit.” Mass-syndicated releases create duplicate, low-signal pages that search systems learn to discount, and any links embedded in paid distribution are routinely treated as non-editorial signals. Google describes canonicalization (deduplication) as the process of selecting a single representative URL from sets of duplicates (Google Search Central — Canonicalization). Google’s spam policies explicitly call out link-related manipulation (Google Search Central — Spam Policies), and its documentation recommends qualifying paid or commercial outbound links with appropriate rel values such as nofollow and sponsored (Google Search Central — Qualify Outbound Links). That limits any SEO upside even when the placement exists.

We have tested this at scale. In a previous review, we could identify only one distributed press release that appeared to attract meaningful SEO traffic. It was an outlier. A project announced a partnership involving NVIDIA on a slow news day, with real cash support and an incubator relationship attached. In other words, it ranked because it was genuinely material to the market.

Across the rest of the releases we reviewed, well over 60,000 pages in total, we could not find evidence of sustained Google search traffic to the release pages at all. That matters even for the more charitable argument that “brand mentions” help. A page needs real, recurring readership before any brand signal becomes meaningful. We are not talking about one or two visits. Without consistent traffic, the mention is just text on a page nobody reaches.

If SEO is the goal, this is wasted spend. The same budget would typically be better deployed into assets that compound: high-quality editorial coverage on pages that people actually read, original research that earns citations, or simply paying a professional SEO team to fix technical issues and build durable content on your own site. As we’ve argued throughout, at best these releases do nothing. At worst, they teach search systems to associate your brand with low-signal duplication.

Then there is attribution.

Founders are shown screenshots of logos and article links, but rarely given referral data, user behavior metrics, conversion tracking, or even consistent analytics screenshots demonstrating real readership. “Impressions” are cited as proof of performance, yet the methodology behind those figures is seldom disclosed.

The whole point of digital marketing is attribution, the ability to trace which channels actually help a business drive revenue. GDPR and modern privacy protections have reduced how granular this can get. Some channels, like podcasts, events, and dark social, will always be harder to map to a click. But press release syndication is sold as a web product, and web products leave receipts.

If you run a website, you have server logs and on-site data. You can see sessions, referral sources, time-on-page, geography, device types, and engagement patterns. Even if a publisher chooses not to surface that data in a client dashboard, the underlying evidence exists.

We tested this directly. We went undercover with five press release distribution vendors, posing as potential buyers, and asked them to demonstrate how they collect, use, and operationalise readership data as part of their product, not as a theory. None of them were able to show that these signals are provided to clients, used to optimise releases, or meaningfully factored into pricing. If any of those vendors can demonstrate otherwise before this article is published, we are happy to retract this claim.

The closest thing to “measurement” we were offered was UTM tags. That is not a serious answer. UTMs can capture click-throughs, but click-throughs are a narrow proxy for what press release vendors claim to sell: awareness, credibility, and distribution. If the product is truly valuable, the absence of richer attribution is not a privacy feature. It is a business model that avoids accountability.

This is where the pitch becomes particularly cynical. The lack of trackability is treated as a feature. Some vendors imply they “don’t track” because crypto people care about privacy. But a web server does not stop collecting basic operational data because a sales deck says it does. Whether that information is aggregated into an analytics tool is a choice. The raw signals still exist, and pretending otherwise is not privacy. It is a refusal to be accountable.

If a campaign cannot demonstrate who read it, how they arrived, what they did, and whether it moved revenue, it is not marketing. It is optics — a pattern we see across broader Web3 trust decay and marketing failures.

This is where the model begins to look less like a growth channel and more like a signaling ritual. A project announces something. The announcement is distributed. Logos accumulate. The homepage looks busier. Investors feel reassured.

But reassurance is not revenue.

In conversations across the industry, we repeatedly heard the same justification: founders “need” press releases so they can show media logos to partners, exchanges, or investors. The irony is difficult to ignore. The logos are treated as third-party validation, even though the placement itself was purchased.

This circular logic persists because the incentives align around appearance rather than outcome. Vendors are not compensated on performance. Publications are not compensated on readership depth. Agencies are not compensated on revenue impact. The only guaranteed metric is distribution volume.

And volume, in isolation, is not proof of value.

The result is an accountability vacuum — a system where money moves, content publishes, and very little can be independently verified.

It was this vacuum that led us to look closer.

The Poorly Defined “62%” Study and the Media Amplification Failure

The turning point came when a PR agency’s study hit the major crypto blogs, and our LLM results reverted almost immediately.

At the time, the broader debate around crypto press releases was still relatively contained: vendors defended their model, critics questioned its value, and most publications continued publishing paid releases without friction. Then a marketing agency released what appeared to be a data-driven exposé.

The headline claim was stark: roughly 62% of crypto press releases were associated with high-risk or scam-linked projects.

In late January 2026, CoinDesk published an early summary of the study, framing it as evidence that press release “wires” were amplifying high-risk or scam-linked projects (CoinDesk, Jan 27, 2026).

Days later, Cointelegraph published a widely circulated version of the same finding, reporting that releases published between June and November 2025 were disproportionately tied to “high risk” projects and scams (Cointelegraph, Feb 03, 2026).

Chainstory later published its full report, describing its dataset (2,893 releases) and its classification approach (Chainstory — Crypto press release distribution platforms).

The report moved quickly.

Look at the wall of fame for press releases. It’s blank now, and it will stay that way.

Within days, major crypto media outlets amplified the findings. Articles summarizing the study appeared across industry publications, often repeating the 62% figure without dissecting the underlying methodology. The narrative shifted almost overnight from “Are press releases effective?” to “Most press releases promote scams.”

On its face, the claim seemed plausible in a market where millions of tokens have failed and the majority of projects have lost value. But plausibility is not proof.

So we examined the numbers.

CoinGecko has reported that more than half of cryptocurrencies tracked on GeckoTerminal have failed, with the majority of failures occurring in 2025 — a reminder that collapse is not an edge case in this market (CoinGecko Research, updated Jan 12, 2026). Yet the study’s framing implied a precise measurement of fraudulent intent — not market failure, not poor execution, but scams. That distinction matters.

When our team contacted the authors directly to clarify their criteria, a different picture emerged.

Their definition of “scam,” we were told, included projects that had received on-chain red flags or automated risk warnings. That definition had not been clearly outlined in the syndicated coverage. It also grouped together confirmed malicious actors with projects that were simply flagged by heuristic systems.

Further, the study categorized approximately 38% of projects as “credible,” a figure that included a material number of unknowns — projects for which insufficient information was available. In follow-up discussions, the authors acknowledged that the true percentage of problematic projects could be higher, but that they had given the benefit of the doubt to cases lacking data.

In other words, the 62% figure was less definitive than it appeared.

None of this nuance was visible in the initial wave of coverage.

Major publications repeated the headline statistic without publicly interrogating the methodology, the definitions, or the assumptions embedded in the classification system. The story traveled faster than the scrutiny.

Here is what even basic due diligence would have surfaced — and what the coverage largely failed to ask:

• “You need a release to get logos” is not a defensible claim. If a project wants to plaster media logos on its homepage, it can do that without paying a wire. The release is not a technical prerequisite. The question is whether the logos mean anything when the placement itself is purchased.
• No evidence was offered that logo strips create real credibility. The story implied that buyers are purchasing releases to manufacture trust signals, but did not test whether anyone is actually persuaded by those signals in a market where almost every project already does it.
• Key terms were blurred. “News,” “coverage,” and “distribution” were treated as interchangeable, even though a paid placement hosted in a low-traffic subdirectory is not reporting and does not imply editorial judgment.
• The definition of “scam” did most of the work. Projects were classified using on-chain flags and warnings. That is a narrower claim than “these projects are scams,” and it should have been disclosed early and prominently.
• The sample excluded off-chain projects by design. If a project had no chain footprint, it was effectively invisible to the methodology. That limitation matters in Web3 marketing, where many releases are not tied to a token at all.
• Unknowns were treated as credible. The 38% “credible” category included projects where risk factors were not known or not measurable in the dataset, inflating the apparent certainty of the headline split.
• The headline outran the method. A heuristic snapshot was presented as a precise market truth, then syndicated widely before readers could see the assumptions underneath it.

None of those questions require a conspiracy theory. They require a newsroom mindset: define terms, test assumptions, and treat marketing claims as claims — not conclusions.

That sequence, study released, statistic amplified, methodology unexamined, revealed something more important than the accuracy of any single percentage.

It exposed how dependent the crypto media ecosystem has become on syndication and rapid content turnover. Not because anyone truly believes a buried press release is reporting, but because the revenue still counts.

The audience for real crypto journalism is smaller than the industry pretends. That makes syndication a survival mechanism: a paid release can generate predictable income in a way editorial reporting often cannot. The result is a structural dependency where outlets keep press-release subdirectories alive, not for readers but for cashflow. We laid out the mechanics of that pipeline in our companion analysis of the Web3 PR distribution scam. That dependency pulls even large brands toward scam-adjacent behavior.

Because when distribution volume is the priority, verification slows down. And when revenue depends on the same distribution pipelines under examination, the incentive to dig deeper weakens.

The episode did not simply challenge press release vendors. It challenged the credibility of the platforms that carried the claim.

And that is where the structural problem became impossible to ignore.

Retractions, Revenue, and the Incentive Trap

Then outlets started deleting the coverage.

By mid-February 2026, it started being reported that some outlets were removing or quietly revising their versions of the story — disappearing URLs, softened language, and little public explanation (Semafor, Feb 15, 2026).

Retractions in themselves are not proof of wrongdoing. Publications update stories for many reasons. But in this case, the sequence raised an uncomfortable question: what changed?

Behind the scenes, the press release economy runs on a simple structure. Distribution vendors charge projects for placement. Publications receive payment — directly or indirectly — for hosting and syndicating that content. Agencies bundle the service into broader marketing retainers. It is a dependable revenue stream in an industry where advertising budgets fluctuate and token markets are volatile.

That revenue dependence creates friction when scrutiny points inward.

If a publication relies materially on press release syndication, investigating the efficacy or ethics of that same pipeline becomes commercially sensitive. The more dependent the outlet, the harder it becomes to separate editorial judgment from financial reality.

No grand plot. If your site is funded by syndication fees, you don’t bite the hand that feeds you.

When we looked at the broader pattern — paid releases flowing through the same outlets that amplified the 62% claim, followed by quiet corrections — the structural tension became clear. Crypto media operates in a narrow margin environment. Syndication fills gaps that banner ads and subscriptions often cannot. Some publishers in traditional business media have responded to similar pressures by publishing explicit funding and labeling guidelines to separate commercial content from editorial decision-making (ITPro, Content Funding Policy).

The result is a system where critical coverage of the distribution model competes with the revenue generated by that model.

In other words, the watchdog and the vendor share a supply chain.

That arrangement may be survivable in a bull market flush with liquidity. It is far more fragile when capital tightens and credibility becomes the only durable asset.

For founders and investors watching from the outside, the episode served as a reminder: the logos on a homepage do not necessarily reflect independent validation. They may reflect a transaction.

And when credibility itself becomes transactional, the entire industry inherits the reputational risk.

The study was just the trigger. The dependency was already there.

It is about a feedback loop where distribution substitutes for diligence — and where financial dependency makes that substitution difficult to challenge.

Press Releases Are Not PR

One lesson became unavoidable as this unfolded: the problem is not communication.

The product being sold isn’t PR. It’s the appearance of coverage.

Press releases, as they are sold in crypto, are not public relations. They are a transactional distribution product — designed to manufacture the appearance of coverage, not to earn it.

PR, by contrast, can work. Real reputational work is slow, relational, and measurable over time. It involves scrutiny, not syndication. It involves journalists saying no. It involves narratives that survive contact with due diligence.

What made the press release economy so revealing was how quickly it collapsed into incentives: outlets needing revenue, vendors needing volume, founders needing logos, and the entire ecosystem quietly agreeing not to ask what any of it produced.

The new problem is that the machines are watching, and they don’t read footnotes and certainly cant fact check the way journalists should.

In the AI era, perception is increasingly shaped upstream — not by what is published, but by what is retrieved, summarized, and repeated by large language models.

And that is where things became unexpectedly interesting.

The LLM Experiment: A Narrative Interruption

It would be easy to turn what happened next into a story about “optimising for LLM search” versus SEO. That is not what this story is about. Most sound SEO practice carries into modern retrieval systems. What changed here was narrower and more revealing: a live demonstration of how statistical framing, distribution volume, and weak gatekeeping can reshape the informational layer in a matter of days.

When we began our experiment, we were testing a simple question. If someone asked Google’s AI Overview whether crypto press releases were a valuable marketing strategy, what would it say?

At baseline, the answer was affirmative. The summaries echoed long-standing sales claims about visibility and brand exposure, largely sourced from the wires themselves and their downstream reposts. There was no credible evidence of measurable outcomes, just generic, low-quality posts repeating the same promises. Our goal was not to “game” search. It was to correct an unsupported default.

We targeted low-volume, low-competition queries and published structured analysis documenting what press release distribution actually produces: no search equity, no attribution, and structural incentive conflicts. Within days, the responses shifted. The language moved from “yes” to “it depends,” introducing caveats about limited long-term value. The intended end-state was simple: a clear “no” — Web3 press releases are a waste of a project’s funds.

What shifted next was not our research, but the surrounding coverage. A PR agency published its own report on press release distribution and pushed it hard across the same handful of high-authority crypto platforms. It wasn’t targeting our low-volume prompts. It was a coordinated promotion for their agency, and by any normal PR standard, the distribution worked.

The headline did the work: “62% of Web3 releases are from scam projects.” It travelled because it was simple, and because it made the agency look like the adult in the room.

The problem was not that the authors attempted research. It was that the methodology was narrow, on-chain only, and poorly explained on the way up. Projects without a chain footprint were excluded. “Scam” was effectively defined as whatever their tooling could flag on-chain. And the 38% “credible” bucket included unknowns that were given the benefit of the doubt. That is a far cry from how the average investor experiences the market. In a cycle where the overwhelming majority of tokens have underperformed and most projects have disappointed the people funding them, headline numbers like this are easily mistaken for a precise measure of fraud rather than a heuristic snapshot.

This is where the platforms that repeated the claim failed their readers. Cointelegraph is a useful example. Cointelegraph markets itself as news, but episodes like this look less like journalism and more like a blog that amplifies PR: it carried the statistic as a “news” story without forcing the definitions into the first paragraph — on-chain flags, exclusions, unknowns treated as credible. That is not journalism. Newsrooms have reporters who verify and interrogate claims before they publish them. When you publish a headline like this without doing that work, you are not producing news — you are running a blog that amplifies opinions and PR. The headline could still have been sharp without laundering ambiguity. Instead, the statistic spread faster than the methodology, and what arrived later was not a public correction but quiet removals and softened rewrites.

The headline emphasized that roughly 62% of releases were tied to high-risk or scam-linked projects. That framing was powerful and commercially effective. The agency was promoting its brand and distributed the story well, earning placements across high-authority crypto platforms. They were not attempting to influence LLM systems, nor were they targeting the low-volume queries we were testing. But the statistical framing introduced a new data point into the corpus.

Large platforms amplified the headline quickly. The nuance behind the methodology did not travel at the same speed. If the definitions had been surfaced clearly in the first paragraph — on-chain flags, exclusions, unknowns treated as credible — the headline could still have been compelling without being ambiguous. That did not happen.

The study wasn’t the problem by itself. The problem was that the biggest platforms repeated the headline without forcing the definitions onto the page.

When that coverage propagated across high-authority domains, the AI summaries reweighted the topic. The existence of a 38% “credible” segment was interpreted as validation that press releases have meaningful legitimacy, particularly when combined with years of legacy vendor claims still present online. The system did what probabilistic systems do: it synthesized volume and authority signals.

We could have continued the experiment and attempted to counterbalance that shift with further distribution. We chose not to. Correcting AI summaries is not our business model. The observation itself was sufficient.

What followed added another layer. Some outlets later removed or softened their versions of the story rather than publish clear, prominent corrections. Retractions alone are not evidence of wrongdoing. But the sequence — rapid amplification without methodological interrogation, followed by quiet revision — underscored the fragility of the gatekeeping process.

The agency did what agencies do: it ran a distribution campaign designed to travel. The deeper failure sits with the crypto publications that treated it as “news” without doing the work that makes news credible. Nor is this uniquely an LLM problem. When unverified claims are repeated across high-authority domains, both readers and machine summaries absorb the headline first and the definitions last.

And the quiet removals that followed were the tell. There was no prominent correction because there was nothing to correct in public without admitting the original piece was never properly verified. What changed was not the truth, but the commercial comfort. These sites cannot rely on CPMs alone to keep the lights on, so they maintain press-release subdirectories as a revenue stream and share in the inflated fees charged by newswire vendors for a product that delivers little to no value. For founders, that means paying a premium for optics. For investors, it means capital quietly diverted into a supply chain that rewards volume over verification.

Real PR still works, but it works for the opposite reasons: scrutiny, earned coverage, and accountability. The tragedy is that crypto media could have played that role. Instead, too often, it behaves like a blog network wrapped in the language of journalism — and now the systems summarising the web are listening.

What This Reveals About Web3

Press releases are not “the reason” Web3 struggles with credibility.

They reflect what the industry has learned to reward: optics over outcomes, distribution over diligence, and narrative over revenue. The syndication machine persists not because it works, but because it produces something founders can point to when real traction is harder to prove, while quietly transferring value from the project to the intermediaries selling the illusion.

The deeper cost is reputational. When paid placements sit adjacent to journalism, when outlets depend on the same pipelines they should scrutinize, and when credibility becomes transactional, the entire ecosystem inherits the fragility.

This is how an industry built on trust minimization ends up maximizing the wrong kind of trust — the kind that can be bought.

A real business does not need syndicated reassurance. It needs customers. It needs revenue. It needs outcomes that survive contact with reality.

And yet, too much of crypto marketing still behaves like a hall of mirrors: announcements echoing through networks that cannot be audited, metrics that cannot be verified, and publications that cannot afford to ask harder questions.

If there is a single word for the professionals who allow that dynamic to persist, it is the one the industry keeps earning.

Clowns.

The opportunity, however, is not cynicism. It is correction.

The AI era is forcing accountability upstream. Narrative is no longer controlled by how many sites will host your copy, but by whether your claims hold up across credible sources, scrutiny, and time.

For founders, the path forward is clear: stop buying optics. Build substance. Invest in real PR, real reporting, and real business fundamentals.

Because blockchain technology is not finished.

But the syndication machine — and the incentives that sustain it — deserve to be.

FAQ

Do crypto press releases help SEO?

No. In 99.5% of situations we reviewed, crypto press release distribution had no measurable SEO benefit whatsoever. Most of these pages are low-quality, duplicated write-ups buried in sub-directories that do not attract sustained traffic. Even when the link attributes are debated, the underlying problem is simpler: pages that do not get read do not compound. If anything, mass-syndicated, low-signal duplicates can contribute to a negative association in search systems and waste resources that should have gone into real, durable content.

Are Web3 press releases worth the money?

No. Above the price of free, crypto press releases have no measurable impact worth paying for. And even in the rare outliers where a release coincides with something genuinely material, the same budget would almost always be better invested in long-term assets: real PR, high-quality editorial work, technical SEO, original research, and content that compounds toward revenue growth. A logo strip is not traction.

Why do crypto publications publish so many press releases?

Because it is easy revenue. The removal and softening of critical coverage, including in the episode documented in this article, is a strong signal of the underlying pressure. Many crypto publications are not attracting a large enough audience for their blogs to survive on ad CPMs alone, so they accept syndication packages from press release vendors. That dependency is not journalism; it is a survival strategy that makes scrutiny commercially uncomfortable.

What works instead of press releases in the LLM era?

There is no evidence that press releases help in the LLM era, just as there is no evidence they helped SEO in the first place. If your goal is LLM-era discoverability, start with proper SEO and credible, compounding assets. Hire an SEO professional with at least 10 years of demonstrated results across multiple industries, because time is the only reliable proxy for adapting through repeated algorithm changes. In an LLM era where shifts are faster and less predictable, you want a track record of adjusting strategy quickly, not a vendor selling “visibility” without receipts.

Sources & Notes

• Web3 Press Release Scam (VaaSBlock Research)
• Web3 PR Distribution Scam (VaaSBlock Research)
• CoinDesk — Over 60% of crypto press releases are linked to high-risk or scam projects, study finds (Jan 27, 2026)
• Cointelegraph — Suspicious projects outpublish legitimate ones in crypto press releases (Feb 03, 2026)
• CoinGecko Research — Dead Coins: Over 50% of Cryptocurrencies Have Failed (updated Jan 12, 2026)
• Chainstory — Crypto press release distribution platforms
• Semafor — Crypto news sites take down posts critical of crypto PR (Feb 15, 2026)
• U.S. FTC — Native Advertising: A Guide for Businesses (2015)
• The Trust Project — Transparency standards for news organizations
• Reuters — Standards & Values (journalistic independence and integrity)
• IAB — Native Advertising Playbook 2.0 (disclosure guidance)
• UK ASA/CAP — Recognising ads: Native advertising (disclosure expectations)
• UK House of Commons Library — Regulation of advertising in the UK (overview)
• Google Search Central — What is URL canonicalization (deduplication)
• Google Search Central — Spam Policies for Google Web Search
• Google Search Central — Qualify Outbound Links (nofollow, sponsored, ugc)
• Google Search Central — Block Search indexing with noindex (updated 2025-12-10)