Closing Out The Year

The Crunchbase News team is almost done publishing its yearly run of predictions, and we’re days away from digging into our fourth-quarter review featuring dozens of charts and thousands and thousands of words on all things venture capital. But before we jump right into another year’s reporting, let’s talk about 2018.

Your humble News team grew from two full-time folks at the end of 2017 to five at the end of this year.  Who joined? The excellent data and venture-focused Jason Rowley when the year began, along with Savannah Dowling, who not only writes some of our most interesting stuff but also leads our weekend email. Mary Ann Azevedo climbed aboard later in the year after a stint as our most prolific contributor. She’s amazingly good.

We’re adding more staff in 2019, and a few other things that I’ll tell you about soon. But that’s next year. What did we get done in 2018? A lot!

Posts

This year News more than doubled its output, publishing over 1,000 articles. Looking at some preliminary data, we averaged over 600 words per piece, so we comfortably shipped north of 600,000 words in 2018. And a lot of charts and graphs.

Next year we’re not going to work to post more in terms of volume, but we’re going to write longer stuff. So, if you like graphs and detailed dives into what we’re seeing in the venture market, we’ll have a lot for you. (You are following us on Twitter, right?)

Thinking about individual posts, we had some hits that were about well-known trends (why uber loses money, top family investment offices, how to read an S-1, construction startups, AI startups), and some concerning topics a bet less famous (universities and H-1b visas, Google and DuckDuckGo).

Our leading topics in the year were Startups, followed by Business, Venture, Public, Data, and Liquidity. That mostly makes sense, thinking about what happened in the year. Crypto and Proust and Diversity came next. There’s work to do in our output, scanning the order of the list, which makes me even more excited about 2019.

In terms of readership, we grew on-site traffic to our work by about around 285 percent in 2018. Putting up 385 percent as many pageviews in 2018 as 2017 is a bit of a faff as we didn’t start publishing until March of the earlier year, but it still felt great. Thanks for reading.

Podcasts

We did more than write in 2018. Our two podcasts hit nice milestones during the year. Equity, a TechCrunch show that we help host, reached its 100th episode this year and did a few live shows in 2018 to boot. It’s going to break two million downloads in January.

Our podcast with the San Francisco Chronicle reached its 50th episode in the year, closing off its most recent season as the year came to a close. Our work with the Chronicle, called Startups of the Week, has always been dual form, hybridizing a weekly written series about local startups and the show.

Check them out if you haven’t, and a big thanks to our co-hosts (Connie, Owen, Danny, Sophia, and Kate) and our production team (Chris, King, and Gregory), not to mention Yashad, Henry, and Ned at TechCrunch who keep Equity on the rails. Additional thanks to Jason Lemkin for coming back on Equity episode 100 and Yunha Kim for being the first-ever guest on Startups of the Week. (And former co-hosts Trisha, Natasha, Katie, and Lynley).

Miscellanea

It’s hard to cram a year’s work into a few hundred words, but here are a few more highlights.

Jason and Holden both went on Cheddar (here and here), which was a treat; Savannah ran hard with our Proust series; Mary Ann wrote some of our longest features to date; and we climbed the Techmeme leaderboard, reaching 39th on its “Presence” leaderboard.

A bunch of folks that we respect also linked to us and some of our research got picked up by the New York Times and made the front page of the Business section in print.

In 2017, we tested the idea that an independent news team could be built inside of a data-focused startup, and it worked. In 2018, we pushed to grow our little publication a hell of a lot. Next year we’re doubling-down on the sort of longer-form work that we think is our best, but there will still be plenty of startup looks, venture interviews, area profiles, and jokes.

It’s going to be great. See you next year.