In-depth Analysis: How the Blockchain Data Tool Dune Rise Rapidly

Author: Pete Boyle; Compiler: Chain Bazaar

When I started doing market analysis, I focused on the growth models of Web 2.0 brands. Honestly, I've never lacked a strategy for analysis. In the Web3 space, the situation is much more difficult, as many projects seem to be following the old "community first" path. That might be fine, but a lot of projects don't do that well, and they miss out on some really easy access. Dune Analytics is one of the brands that has really impressed me over the past few years. I've spoken to people with a decade of experience in the field as well as people just getting in, and they all mentioned Dune.

The amazing thing about Dune is that they didn't take common approaches in Web3 like:

• Airdrop
• "Paid attention" community growth
• Use their own token for earning model (they don't have a token)

They're drawing on a lot of what I would consider to be traditional PR and brand awareness tactics, which can easily lead to dominance in search engine results pages, and it all stems from the way they've built their product. This is an incredible tool and one of the first tools that people think of when they talk about blockchain analysis.

So, how did Dune's meteoric rise come about?

What is Dune Analytics?

Dune is a web-based application that allows anyone (with some knowledge of SQL) to query blockchain data and create visualizations like the one below.

Some even take the time to build complete dashboards that give others an overview of a project, series or even a subset of an industry, like this example on CEXs.

This is a puzzling thing. Dune didn't pay people to build these dashboards, but countless new visualizations appear every day and are promoted by the people who make them (I'll explain why they do this later). In my opinion, they get more attention than many other brands that provide data visualization, such as Nansen.

The question is, how do they do it? Let's take a look.

Dune's Explosive Growth

Dune was founded in 2018. But if you look at the existing analytics tools in the market, the platform won't really take off until around 2021. Organic traffic to SEMRush started to take off in early 2022 (SEMRush has lower numbers and is only considered organic).

At the same time, they start generating backlinks.

This seems to coincide with the brand's A round of financing in August 2021.

At that time, Dune seemed to suddenly appear in everyone's field of vision. People talked about it, shared links, and created visualizations like crazy. For a while, Dune was everywhere.

Interestingly, very little of their traffic comes from Google searches, most of it is direct visits. I'm actually surprised that more of that traffic isn't referral traffic (we'll get to that later).

Very few brands can do this. They've become synonymous with the category they're in (blockchain analytics), and they're often the go-to service when someone needs analytics visualization. As a result, they get a ton of users who don't even need to search. They just go straight to the site and I'll analyze how they did that and explore a few areas where I think they could improve.

Dune helps both supply and demand sides of blockchain data visualization

That's the essence of the problem.

Dune's platform does an excellent job of helping both the supply and demand sides of data visualization.

Dune helps data scientists get noticed and get paid work.

Dune also helps those who need analysis (VCs and content creators) get detailed information across industries.

They position themselves in the middle of these two groups, creating products that help both types of people. As a result, everyone wants to talk about them, so let's dig into the details.

Demand - Provide support for content creators, increase PR and visibility

frankly speaking. The best tools, programs, and products help users achieve their goals. Often, they make the achievement of goals faster, easier or more economical. We are currently in the creator stage. Everyone is producing content, from individuals looking to make a side income to brands looking to reach thousands of new users, and content is the way to do it.

Creation can be done through videos, blogs, podcasts, newsletters and even social media accounts, and the content production is huge. And, if I'm really asking, a lot of the content is pretty generic and nothing more than noise.

The people who create this content don't have to be experts (at least not yet), they're just motivated enough to put in the time to keep producing content. Building an audience by providing an overview similar to everyone else's is a long and difficult process.

However, if you have a unique insight, perhaps derived from data analysis, you will immediately stand out, the data-backed opinion not only carries more weight, but also attracts attention through cool pictures that help explain various elements .

That's what Dune does.

Before Dune, analyzing blockchain data was difficult for all but the most professional technicians. But thanks to Dune and some knowledge of SQL, anyone can create simple charts or more detailed analytics dashboards, and the result is that various creators cite Dune in their work.

Brands and influencers use Dune to talk about project growth or interesting changes in the market.

Large publications like Cointelegraph, with millions of readers, use Dune to enhance their coverage.

Dune also appears in a video tutorial on Web3 analytics.

All of these references not only gave Dune exposure to a wider market, but also brought them backlinks that helped with their organic rankings on Google.

According to SEMRush, Dune has approximately 3.5 million backlinks pointing to its website from more than 14,000 domains.

The Dune company has basically created a product that creators need to grow their business and that they must refer to if they use it. The result is huge exposure and backlinks that help brands grow and thrive.

Supply - How Dune Lets Data Scientists Create Visualizations

When I started working on Dune, the first thing I thought was, "How do they get these people to create these visualizations?" I mean, without the visualizations, Dune wouldn't have gotten the attention and usage in the media.

These guys are actually creating marketing materials for Dune. But why would anyone bother learning how to use Dune?

Again, this comes down to Dune ceding the dominance to allow others to benefit from the product. Data scientist jobs are hard to find. You need a specific skill set and need to demonstrate your abilities to potential employers. Additionally, data scientist positions are highly competitive and relatively well paid. This means that brands that need to hire data scientists only need those who are verified data scientists.

Dune offers opportunities for newcomers to demonstrate their skills and find employment in the field. Dune allows anyone to sign up for an account and start building dashboards for free.

Because it's free to build public dashboards, Dune is effectively a data scientist's portfolio.

For example, it is equivalent to a data scientist's:

• WordPress or Medium for writers (like Mirror.xyz if you like Web3)
• YouTube for video editing
• Figma for UX designers

Aspiring data scientists can create dashboards that showcase their skills and use it to find jobs.

This is great because if someone's viz is featured in a reputable outlet like Cointelegraph, the creator can get a link and thus attract potential customers.

But Dune went one step further with the Wizard program. Those who are very skilled at Dune can become Dune Wizards and show off their creations. They have a special category on the main search page.

As more people start seeing Wizard's work, more brands are reaching out to them for help building their own dashboards, as mentioned in this Dune Wizard interview.

Dune also launched a job board to help these Wizards apply and find jobs.

Some of these jobs pay six figures, which is great for a beginner looking to learn about visualizing blockchain data. But again, Dune isn't the focus and focus of these guys, and they let other people use their product to pursue their own goals.

Blockchain data supply and demand parties "free marriage"

The whole Dune approach is to give others the tools they need to grow and achieve their own goals, and it works very well.

Dune is located at the fantastic intersection of three needs:

1. Data Scientists – who want to build their portfolios and find employment;

2. Creators - they need data scientists to create more engaging content;

3. Institutions – they need to find reputable data scientists who can help them understand their investments or their own developments.

Few brands can do this, and most want the detailed data visualizations they create to be behind a paywall and only accessible to customers. Some other brands charge so much that budding creators don't have access to the tools. Then there are brands that are very focused on protecting intellectual property and not allowing others to share their products.

Dune bucks all of these trends. Anyone can create visualizations for free and use them in any marketing material for free (just provide the relevant citation). On the surface, you might think that Dune is just a tool for visualizing massive amounts of blockchain data, but it is much more than that.

Dune is a matchmaking platform that provides opportunities for those who need data, while also providing data scientists with valuable data. By helping everyone, they are also helping themselves. But how can they help themselves if everything is free?

How Dune earns

While you can create dashboards and share Dune's visualizations for free, they also have paid plans. They know that everyone wants (or needs) their data to be available to everyone. Many projects need specific on-chain data analysis to help them understand how to grow as a brand, they need specific analysis for their own internal processes, Dune offers a paid plan.

Institutions can sign up for a paid plan to help them with in-house data analysis. This is very suitable for projects that have a large amount of on-chain data that needs to be sorted out, or venture capital companies that need to understand the development of the project.

What I like about this model is that you basically get a full product demo for free. Anyone considering purchasing a premium plan can visit Dune to see what kind of data results they can produce. If they enjoy data reading, they are more likely to sign up for a paid plan. If they need help, they can find it directly on the Wizards Portal.

Fields I think Dune missed

I'm surprised Dune isn't getting more organic traffic. If they noticed this, they could increase traffic significantly. Their domain name authority is very high. As of this writing, they have a DA of 78, according to Ahrefs. If you don't know, DA is a third-party metric that evaluates the authority of a website. In general, the higher the DA value (on a scale of 100), the higher it will rank in Google. An authority score of 78 is very high.

However, organic traffic is very low. According to SimilarWeb, organic traffic accounts for less than 10% of the site's total traffic. Why?

Many data visualizations are not optimized for Google search. And I don't recommend changing them either. I think they are fine now. So what did Google index Dune? They tend to index a lot of creator pages.

In fact, I can't imagine how much these pages would show up in search. If I was a consultant for Dune and they wanted to drive traffic, I would try to use the platform to create a data output related to what people were searching for. Below are some basic Crypto search terms. This is just a small snippet.

There are about 20,000 searches per month here, and the competition is relatively low (CMP is on a scale of 0-1, with 1 being the most competitive). With Dune's DA, they can create some articles that are updated monthly and rank fairly high in Google.

They have the following advantages:

• as a recognized authority;
• Possess the right to directly obtain data;
• Have an established audience.

They can easily create high-volume articles and leverage their data to create unique content. In the case above, need to be careful to avoid giving "financial advice", but angles to avoid this issue can easily be found. For example, instead of focusing on "Which Long-Term Cryptos to Buy Today" an article could be created titled "Most Actively Traded Cryptos Over the Last X Months". It is still possible to optimize for the main keywords listed in the image, but avoid making specific investment claims. I imagine they could easily add hundreds of thousands of visitors per month by processing this content. Especially with the current relatively weak SEO approach to Web3.

Summary Dune

I think Dune's success really comes down to two key factors:

1. Have a great product that helps multiple groups;

2. Let people use their product for free, thus promoting free public relations.

While not a marketing ploy per se, the way they constructed it made Dune a household name. They built their businesses with the goal of helping others. Instead of putting themselves at the center of everything, they find themselves there thanks to their generosity.

This is a true Web3 approach.

I do think they could do more in terms of traffic, while I hope their monetization model is good enough to keep them alive as they grow.

The original text was written by Pete Boyle, and the Chinese version was compiled by the Chain Market team. The English copyright belongs to the original author. For Chinese reprint, please contact the editor.