Crypto-native media to lose 33% of traffic by 2025 as crypto becomes easier to follow without it

Last year, crypto-native media traffic decreased as activity across the crypto economy remained strong: stablecoin liquidity increased, USDT transfer volume increased, and on-chain trading remained active.

Instead of pointing to a waning interest in crypto, the split suggested that people continued to follow and use the industry through channels beyond special media.

Our latest Outset Data Pulse report, built on traffic data from the Outset Media Index, showed that for all crypto-native stores, global visits will reach 1.12 billion by 2025, but monthly traffic will gradually decrease as the year progresses. It started with 105.85 million visits in January and ended with 70.78 million in December.

There have been temporary rebounds, including a significant jump in July, but not enough to change the broader trend. In the fourth quarter, crypto-native traffic was sitting at its weakest levels of the year.

On-chain growth continued even as media traffic fell

While media traffic decreased, there was an increase in the on-chain economy. Stablecoin supply, one of the cleanest ways to track liquidity within crypto, increased from $216.95 billion in January to $307.76 billion in December.

That disconnect has become clear in the underlying market data. Tether’s USDT transfer volume, a common proxy for how much value moves across blockchain networks, has increased by half and reached $18.92 trillion for the entire year of 2025.

The volume of the decentralized exchange also rose to $1.76 trillion and reached an annual high in October, indicating that on-chain trading activity remains strong. Taken together, the data pointed to three things rising at the same time: more money in the system, more money moving through it, and more trading happening directly on the chain.

Taken together, this was an active market, not a shrinking one. In other words, crypto-native media traffic decreases when money, settlement activity, and trading continue to flow through the crypto ecosystem at scale.

Crypto has become easier to follow outside of crypto media

Financial technology and general news outlets that include crypto in their mix made 6.91 billion visits in 2025. Their traffic also increased significantly during the year, rising from 366.71 million visits in January to 585.73 million in December. That alone suggests that crypto lives within a wider media landscape than ever before.

Naturally, it is wrong to think that all the general visits were about crypto. But it means that crypto no longer needs its own niche ecosystem in the same way that it once did.

For the past few years, professional crypto publications served as the default entry point into the industry. The articles explained the basics, simplified complex developments, and tracked market sentiment. They help students find out what is most important. Anyone who wanted to keep up with the industry would usually check out a crypto-native outlet first.

That competitive advantage has weakened, not because crypto is less valuable, but because crypto is becoming easier to communicate with elsewhere.

Today, a student can follow the development of crypto through regular financial inclusion, follow his favorite projects and individuals on X, watch podcasts and interviews on YouTube, interact with other enthusiasts on Telegram, and more.

Crypto participation is no longer dependent on crypto media traffic

This means that crypto-native stores no longer have the attention power they once enjoyed. The structure of the crypto media itself is important. The top ten crypto-native stores accounted for only a quarter of the total traffic in 2025, with smaller publications making up the rest.

It is a crowded and fragmented world where no single player dominates and attention is dispersed across a large number of brands. That division made sense when crypto media was the center of the industry’s information flow.

But now it exists alongside a lot more competition than other crypto sites. It competes with financial media, technical media, creators, aggregators, trading venues, and the networks themselves.

Most importantly, crypto-native media traffic and blockchain activity have not flowed together in any clean way. The analysis found no consistent one-month lead relationship or lag between the two. The increase in on-chain activity did not reliably follow the increase in media traffic. And the increase in media traffic did not predict strong blockchain usage in the following month.

That suggests that crypto media traffic is not a proxy for crypto participation. Traffic is an important metric. But traditional stores cover many topics beyond digital currencies and assets. Their audience as a whole is not the same as the crypto readership.

Monthly data can also miss short attention spans that occur within hours or days. But even so, the separation is hard to ignore. Crypto-native traffic fell while the broader crypto economy grew.

Crypto-native media is still important, but its role is changing

Crypto-native media has not lost its value but its place in the ecosystem is increasingly different. As crypto becomes easier to find, talk about, and use on common platforms, social media, and on-chain apps, specialist shops are important as a first stop and a place people go to when they want to understand what’s really going on.
That change means something big for crypto as well. If the industry can continue to grow while professional media traffic declines, attention is no longer the main thing to raise. Crypto-native media is still relevant – just in a different way now. It’s less like the center of the market, and more like a place to help make sense of it once the sound has settled.