What you need to know:

• Nine’s Pedestrian Group has this week launched The Chainsaw, a Web3, cryptocurrency, NFT, blockchain-focused publication.
• Pedestrian, which has one of the biggest audiences in the 18-35-years market, has surveyed its readers – they want more content on these topics. The publisher says 50 per cent of its readers invest and 20 per cent are invested in crypto or NFTs.
• There’s a trust gap between legacy media and small, opaque news sites, Pedestrian CEO Matt Rowley says. Main media reports the highs and lows but little in between. 
• The Chainsaw’s Head of Editorial, Sam Howard, says the site will report on how businesses are using blockchain technology to drive real world change, as well as its intersection with culture.
• Pedestrian’s second and third biggest advertising categories are tech and finance, and that, coupled with potential to connect crypto wallets to the website, spell big upside down the track, Rowley says.
• Listen to Mi3's podcast with The Chainsaw's team on the big picture for blockchain, cryptos, NFTs, punching ponzi schemes and a reality check on the metaverse here.      

The price of Bitcoin has halved since the start of 2022, but this isn’t its first rodeo – there have been five ‘bear markets’ in crypto since the currency was created in 2009.

In Web3, however, ‘bear’ markets are known as ‘build’ markets, and Nine’s Pedestrian Group is betting big on “unfuckwithable” blockchain technology, this week going live with its newly built publication to capture the 20 per cent of young people already invested in the tech.

The Chainsaw, which covers the Culture, Finance and Business around Web3, cryptocurrencies, Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the metaverse, has launched with a team of seven journalists.

There’s a big gap in the global news market, Pedestrian CEO Matt Rowley says, between legacy media distracted by the rollercoaster of top line cryptocurrency prices on one hand and the dodgy websites pushing scams, false hype and Ponzi schemes on the other.

In that gap, Rowley spies a big opportunity. There’s the ‘holy grail’ of publishing – integrating commerce and microtransactions, as well as a booming fintech, crypto and tech advertising market.

“Our second and third biggest advertising categories in terms of where we make most of our revenue are tech and finance. So they were two areas that we were already thinking about how we deepen our offering,” Rowley says.  

“In our current audiences, anywhere between 50 and 60 per cent want to know more about parts of Web3. And what we also then found out when we delved even deeper was that around about 20 per cent of them … have either in some way invested in it, bought in it, or work with it.”

And given 50 per cent of Pedestrian’s readers have investments of any kind, it was a key, switched on audience hungry for more information.

Web3?

To understand the strategy, it’s important to understand the market. Briefly, Web3 is anything underpinned by blockchain technology. That means, Rowley says, there’s no one holder of information – rather, it is split up, or decentralised, across many computers.

“For example, your bank tells you that you have this amount of money, and if they told you you don't have that amount of money, you don't have a lot of people to talk to,” he says.  

“In terms of how many Bitcoin you own, there are thousands of computers around the world that say, ‘yes, you own that many Bitcoin’, and one computer might try and change that, but all the others will say, ‘no, that's not right’. That's the idea of decentralisation, and that code is unfuckwithable.”

Web3 is the next evolution of the internet, proponents argue. Web1 was merely reading or accessing information. Web2 was reading, writing and talking – social media, for example. Web3 will be about reading, writing, talking and owning.

“Blockchain's basically introduced the opportunity to use code or computers to verify that information is true,” Sam Howard, the new Head of Editorial at The Chainsaw, says.

“This is the first time that this has been introduced. That's why we're seeing a whole bunch of use cases that are popping up out of this, and we'll just continue to see more use cases.”

Howard worked at World Vision in content, wrote freelance, and started covering crypto back in 2018. She spent the past almost three years at YAP Global, a communications firm covering cryptocurrency and Web3.

“The last six months were going across US and Europe, basically working with different reporters at different publications,” she says. “From Bloomberg to Time magazine, CNBC, Wired, helping tech journalists, introducing them to the people behind the projects. It's a very complex space with a lot of jargon … there is a big gap in storytelling from a more youth focused lens, which is exactly what Pedestrian Group have been able to nail.”

Culture, Finance, Business

The Chainsaw will have three primary verticals: Culture, Finance and Business, along with a Markets and ‘Chainpedia’ category for explainers on the site. The Business vertical, for example, will share stories of what businesses are doing in the Web3 space, like using the blockchain – as Coca Cola is already – to demonstrate and verify ethical supply chains.

“With Web3, it's about decentralisation, it's about transparency, it's about trust. We will likely see young people start to gravitate towards the brands who are being very honest and upfront about how they're getting their community involved to put their hand up to help make decisions about the future of a company,” Howard says.

While NFTs have been the most prominent example of blockchain technology locally – and digital images of apes may not build the trust and confidence new technology needs, Howard says looking internationally can shed light on other use cases.

“We have like six per cent inflation or so right now, which is causing a lot of alarm for Australians. It's really expensive to buy everyday things, including fuel,” she says.

“But then if you compare that to Argentina, they just hit their inflation rate of 70 per cent. Their dollar is just going down and down and down because their economic structure is broken. And so crypto is enabling people to have a new form of hedge where they can protect their finance from just losing value, every day.”

There’s also ‘fractionalised’ real estate, where home ownership is divided into fractions – lowering the barrier to wealth generation.

“We're not here to defend everything in Web3,” Rowley says. “Are there things that are still clunky and could be better? Absolutely … It can be in terms of things like the scams and things like that that have happened within crypto. We're not here to defend all of that. In fact, we're here to shine a light on that.”

Trust in the chain

A key task will be to build trust in the reporting – while the site is not providing financial advice, a lot of people are putting their confidence in untrustworthy places right now.

“There's also a lot of just poor media that's out there about crypto. There's some media publications that don't disclaim that they're promoting particular brands when they're being paid for it. Or you get young people who are making pretty poor decisions and at risk because they're trusting some crypto bro on YouTube who's got 10,000 followers. Or you have some crypto projects who find ways to get bots to show that they've got a large audience,” Howard says.

Mainstream publications, which have traditionally held more trust, just tend to be “market go down, market go down”.  

“It's important to recognise that last year, 2021, was the first really mainstream growth of blockchain awareness. That was via NFTs. NFTS are just one component of what blockchain can do,” she said.  

“There's been a lot of people I've met who have noticed that, for example, there's no Vice-style deep dives on the subculture phenomenon of Web3… the main goal is to make it approachable. It would be your investigative cultural lens, like Vice, but also because it's data-driven, professional, similar to Bloomberg Crypto, for example.

“When we can, a little bit tongue in cheek, a little bit humorous, as Australians are, but also being a trusted authoritative source of breaking news and insights from the industry.”

‘Holy Grail’ of monetisation

From a publisher perspective, Web3 offers compelling financial opportunities. Rowley says The Chainsaw will begin with an advertising, event and sponsorship-driven model. But there’s moves into subscriptions and e-commerce that make sense.

“If you look at, for example, the [Australian Financial Review], which is the most expensive news subscription in the world, people are willing to pay for financial and tech information. And that's exactly what this is going to be. That's not what we're doing straight off the bat, so to speak, but we'll be going more down our traditional routes of sort of advertising with both Web3 companies and more traditional Web2 companies. But then we do think there's an opportunity in the future,” he says.

“So what you'll find when you start to work in Web3 is that quite often when you're working with a site or a provider in Web3, you have the ability to have a little button at the top right of a website that says ‘connect wallet’. And what that means is then suddenly you're able to do all those things, more than you can do currently in terms of commerce. It's always been a Holy Grail, I think, for all publishers, the concept of whether it's subscriptions or micro transactions or people paying for things. It just makes it so much easier.”

There are already advertising partners close to being on board, Rowley adds – but this is the “build phase” of the project: Building an audience, a following and community.

Talent

The field of blockchain technology, Web3, cryptocurrency and decentralised finance is full of weeds and rabbit holes to dive into. That meant hiring journalists was challenging – it is a tight labour market, let alone narrowing available talent to those with expertise in Web3. “They need to have that experience. I think in many other places, for example, you could set up a team and as long as somebody has got good general journalistic experience, they can pick up a beat. This isn't one of those cases. You can't just learn this thing on the fly, you need to be sort of genuinely in it,” Rowley says.

“We found Sam somewhere between Silicon Valley and Europe, where I think she spent the last few years of her life… Tom, another member of the team – another Aussie. Found him in France, living there and he's come back to do a sort of finance or crypto beat.”

Hype outpacing metaverse reality

A key part of blockchain technology is that it is decentralised, which is where the current iterations of the ‘metaverse’ fall down, Rowley says. The hype is “definitely beyond the reality” at present.

“If you have a look at who's having some of the big plays at the metaverse, they're clearly going for ‘owned metaverses’. And that's, I think, it's kind of an anathema to the idea of Web3 and where a lot of the benefits are,” Rowley says. It is, at the moment, ‘skeuomorphism’– a concept that describes imitation items that resemble the original. In this case, Rowley says the metaverse is being moulded around current use cases.

“Whatever that sort of metaverse is going to look like, it probably looks nothing like what people are trying to do at the moment. Like that kind of little avatar, half avatar of Mark Zuckerberg is probably not going to be the thing that's going to make the metaverse work,” he says. “We'll probably start with gaming and start to broaden out from there.”

Whatever the metaverse, blockchain, Web3 and cryptocurrencies end up looking like, The Chainsaw will cover it, Howard says.

“I do see it as the new digital space race,” she says of the metaverse. “There's just not a whole lot you can do yet because we need to develop more technology around it.”