2023

The cryptocurrency exchange went bankrupt and its founder Sam Bankman-Fried came under federal investigation at the end of last year, and ultimately the level and engagement of coverage of that saga was remarkably similar to what was seen during the Silicon Valley Bank crisis.

Both FTX and SVB were written about roughly 70k times in a three-week period, and those stories received around 2.75 million engagements in each case.

FTX’s crisis went on longer than SVB’s, which has largely subsided in terms of media and public interest at the time of writing this report, whereas FTX’s even continued after this initial three-week period as Bankman-Fried faced charges and extradition based on the exchange’s actions.

Both media and public interest was way down compared to Tesla, with just 64 articles about the recall and 2.2k engagements to those articles.

RAV4 was the main recall, but Honda and Chevrolet were also mentioned alongside Toyota in the top articles.

This was met with almost instant mockery from all sides of the political spectrum, with conservative media triumphant over the decision to pause on the new ‘woke’ design, while mainstream media was largely just confused.

It eventually emerged that this was setting the stage for the company’s Super Bowl campaign, which ultimately failed to land and generated comparatively little public and media interest vs. the initial announcement.

These tended not to be hugely engaging for the public, however, with public interest barely rising over 180k engagements across these thousands of stories.