Setting up a reader revenue model for a news website is hard. Doing so for an entirely new brand is harder. And making it work in the midst of the biggest European military conflict since World War Two takes the challenge to another level.
But three and half years after it launched, the Kyiv Independent now has more than 20,000 paying members contributing between $5 and $100 per month.
Chief operating officer of the title Zakhar Protsiuk explained how the Kyiv Independent has managed to build a 70-strong team (with a newsroom of about 40 people) out of nothing, funded mainly by reader revenue.
He also revealed the strategies and tactics which the team has learned to keep growing and create an institution which they hope will last long beyond the current conflict ends. You can listen to this interview on Press Gazette’s latest Future of Media Explained podcast.
The title was founded with an initial team of 36 in November 2021 after the owner of Ukraine’s leading English language title, the Kyiv Post, sacked the editorial team “because he wanted to have more control over its editorial”.
At least 90% of the Kyiv Independent’s audience is outside the country.
Protsiuk said: “We are a global media brand on a niche topic. So many of the things from Ukraine often misunderstood or underreported.
“The fact of this invasion even happening, it was not really a surprise for lot of Ukrainians. The Russians annexed Crimea in 2014. They’ve been explicit about taking Ukrainian territory before.
“So the fact that this was such a shock to the global community was one argument why there was not enough reporting from Ukraine.
“There was not enough of that English-language journalism that would reach Western capitals, that would reach people around the world. So our mission is really to be that bridge between Ukraine and to larger extent now Eastern Europe and the world and tell those stories from Ukraine.”
Whereas most Ukraine media is controlled by oligarchs or the state, the Kyiv Independent is owned by its journalists and dependent on readers for 70% of its revenue.
Staying close to these reader/supporters is paramount, says Protsiuk.
“Our membership offers you some exclusive things like online events, exclusive newsletters, but the main journalistic body of work that we create is free and available for everyone. So we don’t have a paywall and membership is essentially a way in to access the community rather than to access journalism.
“We do spend a lot of time to make sure that we have a direct communication with pretty much everyone who reaches out to us. So any letter, any sort of comment, anything, they usually always get a response from us, from our community managers.
“We have a Discord space where we have like 2,000 people who are super active and talk every day.
“A lot of people who are our members, they do support Ukraine and they do care about what’s happening. But they are based outside of Ukraine. So very often I feel like they don’t have the people around them. I don’t know, like in Texas somewhere or in some small city in Canada, their friends, they’re maybe not that tuned in to this topic.
“So the fact that we created for them this horizontal connection of other like-minded people creates a lot of value.”
Reinventing the model every six months
Staying nimble is one way the Kyiv Independent has managed to continue growing, with tens of thousands of one-off donations supplementing the regular paying members.
“My conclusion that I arrived to is that more or less every six to nine months your whole model starts to slowly like break down and they need to reinvent it,” Protsiuk said.
“In 2022, the majority of the new members were coming from social media, but we saw a sudden decline and then we had to adapt and start doing a significantly better job with our email marketing and that became now one of the main sources of new members for us.”
One of the keys to successful membership marketing for the Kyiv title is giving readers a behind the scenes look at how decisions are made and the challenges staff face.
Protsiuk said: “What we’ve understood is actually the more we show the internal stuff from the Kyiv Independent, the better emotional connection we can build with these people.”
Twitter (before its acquisition by Elon Musk) helped the title establish a voice following Russia’s invasion in February 2022, growing from 30,000 followers to two million in the space of a month.
Protsiuk said: “Twitter was very important for us and now with every passing months it gets less and less and less important. We try to be pragmatic here because our main mission is we do want everyone to understand what’s happening in Ukraine so if I have to make a decision for example like okay, maybe Elon Musk is a moron, but are we exiting Twitter or not?
“For us the calculus is slightly different because is it going to help people understand what’s happening in Ukraine or not?
“So we are present everywhere. We have a Bluesky account, we have an Insgram account, we have Reddit, Facebook and so on.”
Youtube is currently the title’s fastest-growing platform, with 250,000 subscribers.
The title has some 40 journalists, primarily operating out of its Kyiv newsroom.
Protskiuk said: “Unlike other media who come to Ukraine and then leave, we do live here. Our operation here is permanent. And that allows us to have a better know-how, better insights, better sources and essentially better journalism.
Operating in Kyiv brings its own challenges – from constant tiredness for a team whose sleep is frequently interrupted by drone attacks, to figuring out new ways to keep the power on with backup generators. Protskiuk said empathy is key when looking after staff.
“It’s a very unique story for every staff member of the Kyiv Independent. It’s always different in its own way. Someone has their close ones in the army, someone has their family under occupation, someone has had a very horrible experience with some attacks and this makes the air raid sirens harder for them to cope with than for others.
“So it’s a very different story for everyone and the only thing you can do is to try to listen and understand and adapt separately to each person.”
Advice from the Kyiv Independent: Identify a gap and ‘strike very persistently’
Frontline coverage of breaking news in Ukraine is the core of the Kyiv Independent offering – but it also now has business and culture coverage, reflecting its ambitions to be an institution that survives long after the current conflict is over.
It also has its own KI Insights division, a B2B information service akin to Politico Pro or The Economist Intelligence Unit which provides ad-hoc research reports for organisations like embassies and investments funds.
Asked for the advice he would share for any publisher looking to create a subscription brand, Protsiuk said: “I would probably advise them to be very specific of who their audience is and instead of doing everything for everyone at the beginning, do something very concrete for this exact people they identified as the potential consumers, those who would need this journalism. Because I think we are definitely past the era of everything for everyone – that just no longer works.
“There is a lot of disruption and a lot of problems for media but also opportunities. For example, launching the Kyiv Independent would have been impossible 30 years ago. In an area dominated by print, how would these people in Kyiv build a media brand that would reach ten million people around the world? It would be impossible. Now it is possible.
“So identify what is the gap that you see, then strike very persistently in that one point instead of selecting 20 and going for all 20.”
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