Original: Odaily Planet Daily

Author: Golem

Late at night, after you finish a day of crypto trading and lie in bed tired, opening Tinder to match with a stranger for a wonderful date, an advertisement from a crypto exchange suddenly appears, stating "Complete your first trade to instantly receive xxx USDT reward." You can't help but sigh in disappointment; unable to sleep, you open a video platform to watch an episode of your favorite series, but just as the plot reaches its climax, a 15-second ad interrupts, not for the Macau Grand Lisboa, but for a crypto exchange. At this point, you finally can't hold back and curse, "F**k you, crypto!"

Crypto exchanges are invading the daily lives of ordinary people through advertisements, and behind this is the growth ambition of CEX.

According to official disclosures from Binance, by the end of 2024, the platform's global registered users will exceed 250 million, an increase of about 47% compared to 2023. While this achievement is encouraging, it also means that for top exchanges, the number of new users available in the industry is nearing saturation. To acquire new users, they must actively stimulate the demand of consumers outside of crypto and extend their customer acquisition efforts into Web2.

Who is quietly advertising to us?

To satisfy the ambitions of exchanges, a lesser-known growth department is placing ads in the corners of our cyber lives—Paid ads.

"Within the exchange, we are a department parallel to BD, both responsible for user growth, but we engage with users through paid advertising," Hamburger (a pseudonym) who works in Paid ads at a certain exchange revealed to Odaily.

"Traditional crypto users" mostly interact with the exchange's BD, who not only connect with B-end project parties but also delve into C-end communities, maintaining good relationships with KOLs, website owners, and rebate team leaders, sometimes even acting as customer service to help ordinary users. Some BDs from large exchanges also grow into KOLs, leveraging their personal influence to amplify user growth.

However, as user growth in the industry hits a bottleneck, the role of BDs has become increasingly limited. The difficulty of reaching new users has grown, and maintaining existing customer relationships through differentiated strategies to outmaneuver competitors has become the daily routine for BDs.

Thus, when conventional user growth methods approach obsolescence, Paid ads have become a lifeline for user growth at exchanges.

The goal of Paid ads is to acquire qualified traffic or users (installations, registrations, transactions, leads) at the lowest/optimal cost through paid channels and to convert the advertising results into measurable business growth.

"We purchase advertising resources and display positions on media platforms like the Apple Store, Google, TikTok, and Facebook, and based on the algorithms and audience targeting of these media platforms, we bring some new users to our exchange," Hamburger explained.

Different growth methods also determine the size of the team. According to Hamburger, although Paid ads and BD are parallel departments, there is a significant difference in numbers. "For example, in our exchange, the colleagues engaged in Paid ads globally do not exceed 20 people."

Although the number is small, it is still sufficient. Paid advertising can be divided into self-managed and outsourced. Self-managed means the exchange's Paid ads team collaborates directly with media platforms, uploading materials, building ads, checking results, and making real-time adjustments; outsourced means handing over the advertising work to an advertising agency, which meets the needs of a small team but many advertising platforms.

The use of Paid ads in the exchange sector is not new; it has only been significantly invested in in recent years. According to insiders, Binance began experimenting with Paid ads in 2021-2022, but only started large-scale investment in 2024, while OKX ventured into it even earlier.

"Medium-sized exchanges typically have an annual budget of about $2 million for Paid ads, while large exchanges will spend even more," Hamburger explained to Odaily regarding the budget for paid advertising, but he declined to disclose his exchange's annual budget due to confidentiality reasons.

However, regardless, compared to the paid advertising budgets of Web2 giants, the investment from crypto exchanges is a drop in the bucket. According to public data, Google's advertising budget in 2025 is about $8.7 billion, while Amazon's advertising budget is $31 billion, and Netflix's advertising spending in 2024 will exceed $1.7 billion.

Although there is a gap in profitability, this also indicates that for CEX, the user growth model of Paid ads is still in its early stages and not yet mature. "In theory, the demand for Paid ads from top exchanges is significant, and as long as the results are good enough, the budget can be unlimited," Hamburger asserted confidently.

Ideally, $50 to acquire a new user

According to Hamburger, the ads they are currently running are indeed effective for new user growth. One of the benefits of Paid ads compared to BD is the ability to clearly calculate ROI (Odaily note: ROI stands for Return on Investment, measuring how much net profit can be generated for every dollar invested), allowing for the evaluation of the effectiveness of ads on different media platforms. If a platform's user demographic is younger and more receptive to crypto, then the advertising effectiveness will be better.

"Typically, the Apple App Store has better ad performance, while ads targeting mobile manufacturers perform poorly," Hamburger stated. "However, for major media platforms, from a conversion perspective, achieving $50 per new user is already a good situation."

Although this sounds costly, Hamburger explained that from an ROI perspective, if a budget of $1 million is invested, the ROI can be corrected within a maximum of 6 months.

At the same time, the effectiveness of advertising also depends on the materials used. Generally, for new users, ads containing incentives like first trade rewards are used. Additionally, Hamburger mentioned that ads promoting the advantages of cryptocurrencies or the historical investment returns of Bitcoin are also relatively easy to attract external users.

Regulation remains the main obstacle to the development of Paid ads in the crypto space

By the end of 2024, while taking a taxi in Beijing and passing by the Liaoning Building, a friend next to me pointed at it and said, "If you did advertising in Web2 ten years ago and didn't enter this building, you weren't in the industry." My friend described a golden era of advertising development in Web2, but ten years later, the spring of advertising in Web3 has yet to arrive.

"Due to different countries and policy restrictions, some major media platforms are still resisting advertising for Web3," Hamburger revealed to Odaily. For example, countries and regions like the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom, and Canada explicitly prohibit unqualified exchanges from advertising. Moreover, for different exchange products, the advertising policy restrictions vary; some may allow spot trading ads but not futures or stablecoin investment ads. Some exchanges may use disguised materials to trick the review process, but the risks are very high.

However, there are also countries and regions that are more friendly to crypto advertising, such as South Korea, Vietnam, and Turkey, where regulations are relatively lax and the consumption of advertising is significant.

But globally, regulation still maintains a cautious attitude towards exchange advertising, which is a major reason why the scale of exchange advertising cannot compare with that of Web2 companies.

The biggest problem in Web3: not enough old users, not enough new users

Despite the current situation, Hamburger remains confident about the future of advertising for exchanges. "The biggest problem in Web3 is still user growth," and Hamburger believes that top exchanges in the entire crypto industry have both the demand and responsibility to use Paid ads for user growth.

Amid the uncertainties of regulation, costs, and conversions, Web3's efforts to attract new users through Paid ads are still in the exploratory phase. However, for mature large platforms, it is no longer an option but a necessary move.

In the next phase of competition, it will not only be about who has the bigger budget but also about who understands users better and who understands growth better. The real competition may have just begun.

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