Original author: Pete Boyle

Original translation: Chain Market

When I started doing market analysis, I focused on Web 2.0 brands in Growth Models. To be honest, I never lacked strategies to analyze. In the Web3 space, things are much more difficult because many projects seem to be going the old path of "community first". This may be good, but many projects are not doing it well and they are missing out on some really low-hanging fruit. Dune Analytics is one of the brands that has impressed me over the past few years. I have talked to people with ten years of experience in the space as well as people who are just getting into it, and they all mentioned Dune.

The amazing thing about Dune is that they didn’t adopt the common approaches in Web3, such as:

  • airdrop

  • “Paid to Follow” Community Growth

  • Earning model using their own tokens (they don’t have tokens)

They're leveraging a lot of what I would consider traditional PR and brand awareness tactics that easily lead to a strong position in the search engine results pages, and it all comes from the way they built the product. It's an incredible tool and one of the first tools that people think of when they think of blockchain analysis.

So, how did Dune rise so quickly?

What is Dune Analytics?

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

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

This is a confusing thing. Dune doesn’t pay people to build these dashboards, but there are tons of new visualizations coming out every day and 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 visualizations (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 on the market, the platform didn’t really take off until around 2021. SEMRush’s organic traffic started taking off in early 2022 (SEMRush’s numbers are lower and are only considered organic traffic).

At the same time, they start generating backlinks.

This appears to coincide with the brand’s Series A funding round in August 2021.

At the time, Dune seemed to burst onto the scene. People were talking about it, sharing links, and creating visualizations like crazy. Suddenly, Dune was everywhere.

Interestingly, very little of their traffic comes from Google searches, and most of it comes from direct visits. In fact, I was also surprised that more of their traffic is not referral traffic (we will discuss this later).

There are very few brands that can do this. They have become synonymous with their category (blockchain analytics) and are often the go-to service when someone needs an 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’m going to break down how they do this and explore a few areas where I think they could improve.

Dune helps both the supply and demand sides of blockchain data visualization

That is 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 analytics (VCs and content creators) get detailed information across the industry.

They’ve positioned themselves right in the middle of these two groups, creating a product that helps both. As a result, everyone wants to talk about them, so let’s dig into the details.

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

Let’s be frank. The best tools, programs, and products help users achieve their goals. Often, they make achieving that goal faster, easier, or more affordable. We are currently in the Creator Phase. Everyone is producing content, from individuals looking to make a little side income to brands looking to reach thousands of new users, and content is the way to do it.

There is a huge amount of content being produced, whether through videos, blogs, podcasts, newsletters or even social media accounts, and, if I’m really being critical, a lot of it is pretty mundane, just noise.

The people who create this content aren’t necessarily experts (at least not yet), they’re just motivated enough to invest the time to keep producing it. Building an audience by providing similar overviews to everyone else is a long and difficult process.

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

That’s what Dune does.

Before Dune, analyzing blockchain data was difficult for all but the most technically savvy. However, with Dune and some SQL knowledge, anyone can create simple charts or more detailed analytics dashboards, with the result that all kinds of creators are referencing 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 power their coverage.

Dune also appears in a video tutorial on Web3 analytics.

All of these references not only exposed Sand Dune to a wider market, but also brought them backlinks that helped their organic ranking on Google.

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

Dune essentially created a product that creators needed to grow their business and had to reference if they used it. The result was huge exposure and backlinks that helped the brand grow.

Supply- How Dune enables data scientists to create visualizations

When I started researching Dune, the first thing that came to my mind was, “How did they get these people to create these visualizations?” I mean, without the visualizations, Dune wouldn’t have gotten the attention and use it got in the media.

These are the people who actually create the marketing materials for Dune. But why should anyone bother to learn how to use Dune?

Again, this comes down to Dune giving up the lead and letting others benefit from the product. Data scientist jobs are hard to find. You need a specific set of skills and need to prove 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 want those who are proven data scientists.

Dune gives newcomers in this field an opportunity to showcase their skills and find a job. Dune allows anyone to sign up for an account and start building dashboards for free.

Because public dashboards can be built for free, Dune actually becomes a portfolio for data scientists.

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

  • For writers it’s WordPress or Medium (and if you like Web3, like Mirror.xyz)

  • YouTube for video editors

  • Figma for UX Designers

Aspiring data scientists can create a dashboard that showcases their skills and use it to find jobs.

This is great because if someone’s visualization gets picked up by a well-known media outlet like Cointelegraph, the creator can get links and attract potential customers.

But Dune has taken it a step further and introduced the Wizard Program. Those who are very skilled at Dune can become a Dune Wizard and showcase their creations. They have a special category for this on the main search page.

As more people began to see Wizard's work, more brands contacted them for help building their own dashboards, as mentioned in this interview with Dune Wizard.

Dune also launched a job recruitment section to help these Wizards apply for and find jobs.

Some of these jobs pay well into the six figures, which is great for a beginner who wants to learn about visualizing blockchain data. But again, Dune is not the point and focus of these people, they let others use their product to pursue their own goals.

Blockchain data supply and demand sides "free marriage"

The entire Dune approach is all about providing others with the tools they need to grow and achieve their own goals, and it works incredibly well.

Dune sits at a curious intersection of three needs:

Data scientists — they want to build their portfolio and find a job.

2. Creators – They need data scientists to create more engaging content;

3. Institutions – They need to find reputable data scientists to 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, accessible only to customers. Others charge a lot, so startup creators can’t get access to these tools. And then there are still some brands that are very protective of their intellectual property and don’t allow others to share their products.

Dune breaks all of these trends. Anyone can create visualizations for free, and they can be used in any marketing material for free (just provide relevant citations). On the surface, you might think 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 people who need data, while also providing valuable data to data scientists. By helping everyone, they are also helping themselves. But if everything is free, how can they help themselves?

How Dune makes money

While you can create dashboards and share Dune’s visualizations for free, they also have paid plans. They know everyone wants (or needs) to have their data publicly 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, and Dune offers paid plans.

Institutions can sign up for paid plans to help them with internal data analysis. This is great for projects that have a lot of on-chain data to sort through, or for venture capital firms that need to understand how projects are developing.

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

Areas I think Dune misses

I’m surprised Dune doesn’t get more organic traffic. If they paid attention to this, they could probably increase their traffic significantly. Their domain authority is pretty high. At the time of writing, they have a DA value of 78 according to Ahrefs. In case you don’t know, DA is a third-party metric that rates the authority of a website. Generally speaking, the higher the DA value (out of a 100-point scale), the higher it will rank in Google. 78 is pretty high for authority.

However, organic traffic is very low. SimilarWeb says that organic traffic accounts for less than 10% of the site’s total traffic. Why?

A lot of the visualizations aren't optimized for Google search. And I wouldn't recommend changing them. I think they're pretty good as is. So what does Google index for Dune? They tend to index a lot of creator pages.

Realistically, I can’t imagine how much these pages would show up in searches. If I were an advisor to Dune and they wanted to increase traffic, I would try to use the platform to create data outputs related to what people are searching for. Here are some basic Crypto search keywords. This is just a small snippet.

There are about 20,000 searches per month here, and 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 a few articles that are updated once a month and rank pretty high in Google.

They have the following advantages:

  • as a recognized authority;

  • Have direct access to data;

  • Have an established audience.

They can easily create articles that target high search volume and use their own data to create unique content. In the above case, one needs to be careful to avoid providing "financial advice", but it's easy to find angles that avoid this issue. For example, instead of focusing on "Which Crypto Should I Buy Today to Hold Long Term" an article could be created called "Most Actively Traded Crypto in the Last X Months". This can still be optimized for the main keywords listed in the image, but avoid making specific investment statements. I imagine they could easily increase their visitor count by hundreds of thousands per month by working on 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. Allowing people to use their products for free, thereby promoting free public relations.

While this isn’t a marketing strategy per se, the way they structured it made Dune a household name. They built their business around the goal of helping others. Instead of putting themselves at the center of everything, they found themselves there thanks to their generosity.

This is a true Web3 approach.

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

The original article was written by Pete Boyle, and the Chinese version was compiled and edited by the Chain Market team. The English copyright belongs to the original author. Please contact the translator for Chinese reprint.