After leaving CoinTelegraph, I disclosed information about the publication's practices. The current CEO and co-founder, who arrived after the site's founding, attacked me on ZapChain. She characterize
After leaving CoinTelegraph, I disclosed information about the publication's practices. The current CEO and co-founder, who arrived after the site's founding, attacked me on ZapChain. She characterized my claims as attention-seeking and asserted her commitment to truth. She also denied that CoinTelegraph accepts payment for coverage, claiming the company disclosed any paid arrangement to readers.
I responded with DKIM-signed emails demonstrating that the company had asked me to rewrite articles for insertion into Cryptonote's Wikipedia page to avoid copyright removal. The CEO disputed this, saying the practice occurred before she joined and therefore fell outside her responsibility. This struck me as inconsistent with her claims of being both CEO and co-founder.
After that exchange, I reviewed the emails the CEO had sent to my address. She forwarded "leads" to the editorial team that were press releases from her contacts. I didn't read all of them at the time, and some good stories got past me. But when I went back through them, I found something significant: one email thread showed the CEO had a close working relationship with Neucoin.
The Neucoin developer was direct about his intentions. He wanted to "get a huge presence on your family of sites over the next 3 months." He also mentioned a scheduled interview with Allen Scott, which never materialized. That failure may have prompted the push for paid coverage.
The CEO's response showed how she framed the opportunity. "Dan, Great to hear this and super excited about the launch!" she wrote. "Linking you with Addy (CCed) who will help you build the right campaign for your business. Do you have a budget? Big smiles for you and the team! Regards, Toni Lane Casserly, TLC. (Sent from my mobile. Please pardon any error of the thumb.)"
The Neucoin developer replied: "Hi Toni and Addy We don't have a precise budget quite yet, but we'd love to get a proposal (and very good bulk discount for special friends price) to get a huge presence on your family of sites over the next 3 months. Also, maybe it's too late, but we never heard back from Alan Scott about writing for tomorrow or the interview. I am going to blame Martin Stein at Social Radius (works with Michael Terpin)… We did have long interviews with techcrunch, venturebeat and coindesk so there will be plenty of coverage tomorrow but would have been nice to be in cointelegraph too. Any way you can connect me with Alan or somebody else at CT that I could speak with tomorrow morning PST? (it is 1am in Paris and i'm toast). Talk soon Dan"
She then brought in her editorial team: "Dan, Let's get you set up in a skype room and set a meeting time with Addy for this week. I'm adding Allen, Ian and Cheryl to this thread. They're our editorial team and will carry that conversation from here! Looking forward to teaming up! Regards, Toni Lane Casserly, TLC"
Addy Crezze, whom I was told handled website and app development, also managed advertising. Martin Stein, a PR representative for cryptocurrency companies, had never proposed any pay-to-play arrangement to me.
Neucoin did purchase advertising on CoinTelegraph. That in itself was acceptable. Paid promotions that mixed with editorial content crossed a line.
Over the following months, Neucoin received striking coverage on CoinTelegraph. CoinDesk ran one article on Neucoin. Bitcoin Magazine published one. Cryptocoinsnews covered it twice. CoinTelegraph published four articles, included Neucoin in its business catalog, and gave Neucoin prominent placement in an article about successful crowdsales, featuring it alongside Ethereum and Maidsafe while removing Swarm, which had raised more money. Ziftrcoin, another company that bought ads on CoinTelegraph, also appeared above Swarm in that ranking. CoinTelegraph's Peercoin catalog page carried a Neucoin mention.
All five articles came from two writers: Charlie Richards and William Suberg. These were ghostwriters with no online footprint and no accountability mechanism.
Once the three-month window mentioned in the email passed, CoinTelegraph stopped publishing about Neucoin.
When I was still trying to fix CoinTelegraph from within, I pulled months of data on articles with suspicious share-to-view ratios. Social shares determined writer pay. I found that Charlie Richards, William Suberg, and editor Allen Scott benefited most from bot activity that the site blamed on external actors. Two Twitter accounts drove most of the bot shares: Bitcoinzwoman and Bitcoinzman. Both continue to post CoinTelegraph articles in unusual volume.
The methodology made no sense to anyone. An article would have thousands of shares but few views, or vice versa. Both Richards and Suberg stopped writing for CoinTelegraph in July, or at least stopped under their original names. I'm still investigating one of the accounts connected to them on Skype.
I'm not accusing Richards or Suberg of wrongdoing. No email proves those four articles came from the Skype conversation that followed the email chain, but the timing suggests a connection.
After the three months ended, CoinTelegraph moved on from Neucoin coverage. I don't know whether the ghost writers had direct dealings with Neucoin or arranged payment schemes with CoinTelegraph. Management kept everything opaque and provided no clear answers.
When the pay system shifted to prioritize views over shares, the patterns flipped. Articles had 20,000+ views but normal share counts. CoinTelegraph writers drew assignment leads from a Trello board. Someone could slip promotional content into those leads without the writers knowing. Heavy social media promotion boosted an article's pay. That sequence encouraged writers to pick up future Neucoin leads from Trello. That's what happens when a news operation depends on funding from the companies it covers. You stop knowing what's real and what was promotional, a question I grappled with throughout my time at CoinTelegraph.
You don't face that question here. Did this piece merit one measly mBTC? If you want to see more from us, please consider donating. One mBTC costs less than 0.25 USD right now and keeps us from resorting to the tactics detailed above.
