Crypto YouTube Crisis: “Even at the 2018 Bear Market, I Had Double the Views”

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Carl Runefelt remembers a different YouTube. The Swedish creator, known to his 650,000 subscribers as Carl Moon, has been making crypto videos since 2017, and he says this bear market has produced a viewership collapse he could not have predicted. In an interview with BeInCrypto, Runefelt described the moment plainly. “Even like back in 2018 bear market, like at the low of the bear market, I had more than double the views that I have right now.” That single line captures a structural reality that the entire crypto creator economy is now wrestling with. Crypto YouTube, once the dominant retail discovery channel for the asset class, is facing its worst crisis to date. The numbers, platform behavior, industry layoffs, and search trend data all point in the same direction. The Platform Turning Hostile In April 2026, YouTube removed multiple crypto channels in a sweep that the platform justified as targeting “harmful and dangerous” content. The purge wiped out roughly 35 million combined subscribers across affected creators, including Bitcoin.com’s flagship channel, which had been active since 2015. For top creators still standing, the platform that built crypto YouTube is no longer a reliable home for it. Runefelt described the broader pattern. “I’ve checked other channels and it seems to be the same across the board. Like it’s very few YouTube channels that are still actually pulling some good views.” He emphasized that the squeeze is not isolated to his channel and that he has been making YouTube videos since 2017 across multiple cycles. None of his previous bear markets produced this kind of viewership collapse. The View Collapse, in Numbers In a separate appearance on the Matt Haycox Show podcast in late 2025, Runefelt put specific numbers to the decline. During the 2021 cycle peak, his videos routinely pulled 100,000 to 200,000 views each. By early 2026, with Bitcoin trading near $76,500, that range had collapsed to roughly 15,000-20,000 views per upload. For perspective, his views during the 2018 bear market low were more than twice what he records today, despite seven additional years of channel growth and subscriber accumulation. The trajectory is not typical for a bear market dip. It is a structural step down. Carl’s Diversification Faced with that landscape, Runefelt has been openly redirecting his attention. He told BeInCrypto he is now focusing significant energy on motorsport racing and music. “I’m also focusing my energy on other things outside of crypto… motorsport racing nowadays. And I’m also focusing on my music because I love making music.” The framing is not despair. It is adult triage. “Life is too short to struggle bear markets, you know, 24/7. I’ve done a few of those already, and I want to also have fun before it gets too old.” Runefelt is not leaving crypto. He still publishes regularly and continues to invest in startups through TheMoon Group, which has backed more than 350 projects. But after seven and a half years of channel growth that has now reversed, his decision to diversify his identity beyond crypto creator is the most honest data point in the entire interview. Apathy as a Measurement The view collapse is not just a vibes problem. It is now empirically measurable, and Benjamin Cowen, founder of Into The Cryptoverse, has been the loudest voice arguing the data. Cowen’s Bitcoin Social Risk chart, published to his X account, color-codes Bitcoin price history by social engagement intensity. In the 2017 and 2021 cycle tops, the chart prints in bright reds and oranges, signaling extreme retail engagement. The 2025 top, at much higher absolute Bitcoin prices, prints in cold blue, signaling low engagement. As Cowen has framed it in his BeInCrypto coverage, this cycle topped on apathy rather than euphoria. The implication for creators is direct. There was never an euphoric audience peak in this cycle, which means the views creators built their business plans around in 2021 may have been a historical anomaly, not a bear-market lull. Google Trends data supports the same conclusion. Worldwide search interest in “Bitcoin” has trended near one-year lows for much of early 2026, despite spot prices well above $70,000. The Industry-Wide Pain Runefelt flagged a broader pattern in the interview that has since hardened into hard news. “Even the exchanges, usually exchanges are the only ones making money, but I’ve seen even many exchanges are struggling, doing big layoffs and even a couple of them going bankrupt.” The data quickly caught up to his observation. In May 2026, Coinbase announced it would cut approximately 700 jobs, or 14% of its workforce, following a $667 million net loss in Q4 2025 and a 21.6% year-over-year revenue decline. Crypto.com announced its own 12% workforce reduction in March 2026, eliminating roughly 180 positions. The smaller exchange, Bit.com, confirmed a phased shutdown from December 2025 to March 2026. Beyond the trading platforms, the contraction has spread across the crypto labor market. Crypto job postings have fallen approximately 80% year-over-year, with major announcements at Gemini, Algorand, Block, MARA Holdings, OKX, MANTRA, Polygon Labs, and Messari layered on top of the exchange cuts. The decline is structural, not seasonal. David Wulschner’s Counter-View David Wulschner, the host of the German-language Crypto Familie channel, sees the same conditions through a different lens. He launched his channel in mid-2022, near the bottom of the prior cycle. “I just founded my channel mid of 2022, when we were really at the bottom of the cycle, and that was a lot of fun.” The hardest challenge for newer creators in this bear market has not been view drops but community emotional pressure. “What was really hard for me as a new content creator in that bear market was the emotions, the feedback, and that what you get thrown into your face by the community.” Wulschner sees the bear market as the work phase, not the marketing phase. “Profit is not done in the bull market. You set your goals, you set your foundation, you set your anchor positions in your portfolio in the bear market.” That framing is not contradictory with Runefelt’s. The veteran and the newcomer have arrived at the same conclusion from opposite directions. Both treat the current environment as a reset rather than an ending. The Shake-Out In the interview, Runefelt did not present the crypto YouTube collapse as a tragedy. He framed it as a structural cleanse. “That’s usually what we need to shake out all the bad stuff, all the scams, and all the people that are not here for the vision. They’re only here for the quick money. So getting rid of that before we go back up, it’s just part of the cycle.” The creators who survive this cycle will likely be the ones who can adapt their business model below the 2018 baseline of views, broaden their content beyond price predictions and pump speculation, or, as Runefelt is doing, diversify their identity beyond the crypto-creator label. Crypto YouTube is not dying. It is downsizing, and the shape that emerges on the other side will look very different from the cycle creators built businesses around four years ago. Carl Moon, the man who turned a Stockholm supermarket job into one of the most-watched crypto channels in the world, will probably still be there. He will just be making music and racing cars on the side.

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