The world of cryptocurrency is fast-moving. What made headlines just yesterday may be completely irrelevant today, and what’s in the news today will likely be outdated tomorrow. Crypto-related news stories appear at such a rapid speed that keeping up with everything that’s going on in the industry is fiendishly difficult.
Luckily, with the advent of crypto news aggregators, our lives have become a little bit easier in that regard.
As a company with hands-on experience in creating aggregation solutions for the media and entertainment industry, we would like to elaborate more on the topic of cryptocurrency news aggregators. In the following paragraphs, we:
- Describe what crypto news aggregators are and why users like them.
- Reveal the benefits of aggregating news.
- Provide examples of the best crypto news aggregators.
- And, most importantly, show how to build a crypto aggregator from scratch.
So if you want to contribute to the crypto world by creating your own news content aggregation platform, stay with us!
What are crypto news aggregators and what makes them convenient?
A crypto news aggregator is a website or application that collects cryptocurrency news articles from various sources and presents them in one place. It allows users to access the content they’re interested in within a single platform instead of browsing multiple websites in the search for interesting news. That’s what makes such solutions highly convenient and popular.
Most aggregators gather content from trustworthy news websites, blogs, and relevant social media sources. Also, it’s important to note that they don’t publish entire news articles. Instead, they post excerpts: usually, a title and description (sometimes, only a title) with a link to the original source. However, it is technically possible to publish entire materials—more on that later.
The most advanced aggregators offer filtering features, enabling users to filter news by category, popularity, source, and other parameters. Very few even have their own recommendation algorithms to deliver the most relevant content to news seekers.
Top news aggregators in the crypto market
In the cryptocurrency world, the most popular news aggregators are:
- CryptoPanic. CryptoPanic provides crypto-related news, allowing users to track the price movements of cryptocurrencies, and monitor social media sentiment. This crypto news aggregator supports lots of filters, helping visitors get rid of the information they are not interested in.
- Cryptorank. Cryptorank is another popular portal that monitors the prices of cryptocurrencies, provides lists of active and upcoming IDOs as well as ICOs, and gathers news from crypto-related sources.
- CoinSpectator. This website provides real-time virtual currency news for traders, investors, and enthusiasts. CoinSpectator has a big archive of articles, so visitors can not only read the latest crypto news but also discover topics that made headlines months ago.
- Messari. Messari is a crypto-related website and also a news aggregation platform publishing materials from trusted sources. It uses the subscription-based business model—to access the news, you need to subscribe to the Messari Pro plan.
The main benefits of cryptocurrency news aggregators
Now that you know about crypto news aggregators, the next question is: why bother creating one?
Well, let us introduce you to the benefits of developing such a solution:
- Simplicity and cost-effectiveness. With crypto aggregators, you don’t have to worry about creating your own content and hiring an expensive marketing team. Your main concern will be only collecting someone else’s materials—and that can be entirely automated. Thus, it should come as no surprise that aggregating content is way cheaper and less labor-intensive than creating one.
- SEO-friendliness. Even though content aggregation implies publishing duplicate content, crypto news aggregators are still SEO-friendly. On rare occasions, aggregated content can even outperform the original one. Thus, if you manage to accumulate enough backlinks, you will have all the chances to rank well for the “crypto news” keyword and related terms.
- Convenience for cryptocurrency users. News aggregator sites are convenient, as they allow for accessing news content from multiple websites in one place, helping crypto enthusiasts keep track of current events with higher efficiency.
- Faster and simpler development. Compared to creating a news website, developing a news aggregator is much faster, simpler, and cheaper.
Crypto news aggregator development in 4 steps
Finally, we got to the main topic of this article.
So how to develop a crypto news aggregator? Well, it takes four steps.
Step 1: Choose a data aggregation method
There are multiple ways to aggregate content from top news sources.
RSS feeds
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that enables users and applications to access website content updates in a standardized format. Most news websites have RSS feeds, so you can connect your application to them and extract news articles as they get published.
The drawback of this method is that RSS feeds allow you to access only excerpts from news articles—to publish the full material, you will have to use scrapers.
Web scrapers
Another method to aggregate news data is by using a custom web scraper. Web scrapers are usually used in conjunction with RSS feeds as they need URLs to scrape content from. Scrapers can help you get more complete information compared to RSS feeds but they are hard to develop and set up. However, if you want to publish entire materials rather than excerpts from articles, investing in a web scraper is necessary.
APIs
Big news publishers have their own APIs, allowing you to access their content. For example, New York Times, The Guardian, and Bloomberg provide API access so that you can connect to them and collect their content. The bad news is, most popular cryptocurrency news sites don’t have APIs, so using this method in this particular industry is ineffective. However, you can still access big news publishers and collect only crypto-related content from them. You can even automate the process by creating a filtering script.
As mentioned above, most crypto news aggregator websites and applications publish excerpts from news articles rather than entire materials. That’s because they gather content through RSS feeds. This method is the most common in the crypto market.
Step 2: Find trustworthy sources of data and connect to them
Once you decide on a data aggregation method, the next step is to find trustworthy sources of cryptocurrency news. Be extremely picky—the quality of your crypto news aggregator depends on that.
Here are some news portals with RSS feeds you can connect to:
- Bitcoin Magazine (by the way, AnyforSoft participated in this project).
- CoinDesk.
- Cointelegraph.
- CNBC (the Crypto World section).
To get a link to the RSS feed of a news portal, scroll its page down and find this icon (it may look a bit different, but you got the idea).
Click on it, and you will be redirected to the RSS feed.
If you can’t find this icon on a website, try to put /feed after the website’s URL. For example: bitcoinmagazine(dot)com/feed.
To extract information from an RSS news feed, you’ll have to fetch it and then parse the XML syntax. That requires coding. If you don’t have web development skills, you may try to find a CMS plugin that could fetch and parse XML for you. For example, WordPress has multiple plugins for dealing with RSS feeds (WP RSS Aggregator, Feedzy RSS Feeds, and so on). However, note that plugins provide fewer customization options than code.
Step 3: Organize your content
So now you have materials coming to your crypto news aggregator from various sources. If you just publish them one after another, that will be extremely inconvenient for the end user. Therefore, it’s always a good idea to organize your content. You can sort it by date, source, topic, or any other parameter. For example, CoinSpectator sorts its content by source, making it easily accessible and visually distinguishable.
Also, you should develop filtering features to enable visitors to filter news by coin, category, source of information, popularity, and other parameters. That way, they will be able to access relevant content way faster.
To give your blockchain news aggregator a competitive edge, you may implement machine learning to create personalized recommendations for each user. That will lead to higher customer satisfaction rates and help you dramatically increase user retention.
A good example of crypto news aggregators with advanced filtering is CryptoPanic. We advise you to browse this site for a while to see what features it offers and adopt them when developing your own portal.
Step 4: Test and launch
When everything is done, the last step is to thoroughly test your platform to ensure the best user experience after launch. You need to go through all the features that you’ve created and check whether they work as intended. However, without knowledge of quality assurance testing methodologies, you won’t be able to test your platform properly. That’s why you should hire a professional QA engineer that would implement manual or automated testing techniques to check every aspect of your website.
Unfortunately, many website creators neglect this step and release their products without proper testing. This results in buggy interfaces, slow website speed, and numerous on-page errors. If you don’t want to spoil the user experience for your visitors, never skip the QA stage.
Wrapping up
Developing a crypto news aggregator is a piece of cake for a seasoned developer. Yet, it is an extremely daunting task for those who have no coding experience. That’s why if you plan to develop a platform to help crypto lovers easily access the content they’re interested in, don’t hesitate to contact a development company.
AnyforSoft has vast experience in creating both news portals and news aggregation websites. Most importantly, we always care about the vision of our customers and develop solutions in accordance with their preferences and requirements. That is one of the reasons why our company has a high customer satisfaction rate and positive reviews from clients.
Don’t trust words—check it for yourself. Contact our team and tell us more about your project. Let’s create a great crypto news aggregation website together!
