Apologies for being out of touch; it's been a busy time. NewsBTC, however, has still been chugging along, as has its franchisees. There were some ups and downs, but the future is looking brighter than ever.
We briefly had an chief editor named Tamer, despite the objections of a couple other employees (like me). Although he did a couple good things for our Google ranking, he was trolling Reddit and writing stories that look bad for Bitcoin (such as about ISIS links), so boss-man finally got rid of him. We have many new associates including Ruben Alexander from the old Bitcoin Magazine, instead.
We've since recovered fully and grown immensely. Although traffic has been quite sporadic--I personally haven't had much time to write, being currently stuck in a third world country--its peaks have been record highs for us. Our Alexa ranking has also continued to climb, and is now below 30K and still improving. We've also
partnered with Ascribe in addition to our DECENT partnership, as we're very committed to blockchain-based content and rights management.
The NewsBTC franchise hasn't grown much in all the chaos, but existing franchisees have been benefiting from the growth of our brand. We're releasing some new programs and tools to support them, and have added some more organization to the whole thing to keep it together as it expands.
As part of these efforts, we've also revamped the NewsBTC franchise world map. Darker blue regions are going strong and not heavily in need of more partners or writers, while lighter blue regions are looking for additional partners to reinforce the domain by splitting its work load and ownership. The latter now includes Latin America, which--while still one of the strongest franchises (if not the)--recently lost some staff, and needs bolstering due to its size
Please let us know if you're interested in becoming a franchisee and running your own NewsBTC domain. Doing so remains free of charge, as always, except for the percentage we take from any ad revenue you generate in order to cover our expenses.
