The Kyiv Independent: it’s all about freedom

Editor’s note: Kyiv Independent executives interviewed for this article – Daryna Shevchenko, Jakub Parusiński, and Zakhar Protsiuk – are also co-founders and editors of The Fix

Today, The Kyiv Independent is the biggest English-language media outlet in Ukraine with ambitions spanning far outside the country. Its one-year history has been spectacular from the very beginning.

Everything started with the closure of the oldest English-language newspaper in Ukraine, Kyiv Post. The former editorial team described the decision of Adnan Kivan, Kyiv Post owner and Ukrainian-Syrian real estate tycoon, to dismiss the whole staff as an “act of vengeance”. The dismissal was especially dramatic in the face of the looming threat of Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine when the country attracted the world’s attention.

On November 22, 2021, exactly two weeks after that, ex-Kyiv Post employees officially announced the founding of The Kyiv Independent. Just three months later, Russia began its all-out invasion of Ukraine. 

The Fix’s Sofiia Padalko spoke with The Kyiv Independent’s founders and leaders about the publisher’s growth strategy, as well as its financial independence, audience strategy, and goals for the future.

How a quick start prevented The Kyiv Independent from plunging into a crisis

Just to understand The Kyiv Independent’s launch tempo: a week after Kyiv Post closure, the first weekly newsletter was sent out. In the next two weeks, the team launched the podcast Media in Progress, tracing the behind-the-scenes of the project, and the website. In the first stage of development in November and December 2021, it was essential to define which tasks required speed and which required quality, says Daryna Shevchenko, CEO of The Kyiv Independent.

“We managed a lot in a short period of time and were faster than our competitors, who had more resources when we didn’t have anything. We attracted an audience that has not yet switched to the relaunched Kyiv Post, and drew the attention of decision-makers and stakeholders before the Christmas break. In the beginning, everyone did everything: editorial strategy, fundraising, selling advertising. It has been working, but we must quickly move to the stage of institutionalisation”, Shevchenko recalled . (Kyiv Post suspended publication after the newsroom was fired in November 2021 but resumed work later with a new team).

Shevchenko further explains that the division of responsibilities was difficult because many people were doing something for the first time. The financial situation at the beginning was also not conducive to this. In January The Kyiv Independent had its first payroll of around $18,000. Out of over 30 people, a third had to quit. It was impossible to retain everyone on the money received from grants – someone resigned voluntarily, and some team members had to get part-time employment elsewhere.

60% of The Kyiv Independent belongs to its newsroom and 40% to Jnomics, a media consulting company that has supported The Kyiv Independent since launch, Olga Rudenko, editor-in-chief of The Kyiv Independent said in an interview for Detector Media.

At the beginning of February, The Kyiv Independent already worked with advertisers, implemented several projects, started looking for new people for the team to form new departments, and rented an office. By February 24th, traffic had also grown significantly to around 200,000 unique users per month. Then the all-out war started.

According to Shevchenko, The Kyiv Independent saved itself by “doing their homework”: “We launched a lot of processes earlier and the stupor in war conditions didn’t harm us as much as it could. For example, [we had] a GoFundMe fundraiser, which already had $20,000 collected, and a Patreon with 600-700 patrons and a developed plan for their engagement. Many other publishers started doing this only after the invasion began. We already had grants, agreements  were signed for approximately $300,000. The first advertising revenue came – about $22,000”. 

Of course, advertising contracts that were only in the plans were put on pause when the war started. Advertisers began to return only in July, The Kyiv Independent’s CEO said.

After the beginning of the full-scale war, The Kyiv Independent invested a lot into the security of staff: organising security and medical courses, and providing equipment for the work on the frontlines. Although the war taught people resilience, mental health became an important topic as well, according to Shevchenko. She told The Fix that the company is working on providing individual help to co-workers who may need it.

Building financial independence from scratch

It’s safe to say that The Kyiv Independent achieved financial success, having accrued meaningful reader revenue with the start of the full-scale war. The publisher bases its financial strategy on the diversification of revenue streams:

#1 Membership on Patreon

Patreon is a dominant source of income for the publisher. As of November 9th, 2022 The Kyiv Independent had 8045 patrons paying around $74,200 brutto per month. There are five levels of membership with $5, $10, $30, $50, and $100 monthly contributions. Each one has a different set of benefits. According to Graphtreon, the average check per patron is $9.1

The Kyiv Independent’s Patreon account seems to be the largest among Ukrainian media organisations, Rudenko said.

The Kyiv Independent is working on providing the ability to support them directly, not only through Patreon, Zakhar Protsiuk, Chief Development Officer at The Kyiv Independent, told The Fix. “External platforms are great when you launch fast and don’t have resources. Now we need to have more control over our data. This doesn’t mean the closure of our Patreon; we just want to give another option of supporting us directly”, Protsiuk says.

#2 Crowdfunding via GoFundMe

The main difference between Patreon and GoFundMe campaigns is that for the one-time GoFundMe donation patrons don’t get anything in return, as in the case of membership. However, GoFundMe also played a very important role during the publisher’s launch and at the beginning of the war. The goal to collect £10,000 was reached and surpassed in 10 days, Elina-Alem Kent, Media in Progress producer, said in the fourth episode of the podcast.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, The Kyiv Independent started promoting its GoFundMe fundraising on all available social media platforms, encouraging team members to do the same on private profiles. This was especially impactful in the case of Illia Ponomarenko, The Kyiv Independent defence reporter, who has 1,2M followers on Twitter. Late February was a period of incredible subscriber growth on the publisher’s channels: from 30,000 subscribers on Twitter three days before February 24th to 1 million in a couple of days after it. 

As of November 9th, 2022 there are £1,683,570 raised for The Kyiv Independent on GoFundMe through over 28,000 donations. Money from crowdfunding serves as a financial cushion for the company, Rudenko says.

#3 Grants

This revenue stream also played a significant role, especially during the first few months of existence, Parusi?ski told The Fix. “At the beginning, when we didn’t know what would happen to us, we applied for grants and received several: two relatively large ones from NED and EED (approximately $140,000 each), as well as grants from the Renaissance Foundation and IMS. We appreciate that someone initially believed in us and gave us this money”, Rudenko told Detector Media.

#4 Syndications

Selling content to other publishers is one of the most promising revenue streams for 2023, according to Shevchenko and Parusiński. “We have an agreement with Bloomberg, with Yahoo, and we are working on new big partnerships and selling one-time materials. For us, it is also mission-critical, as syndication provides an opportunity to bring our content to other communities that we cannot reach on our own”, Shevchenko said. Contract amounts are decided individually; the example range is from $30,000 to $100,000 per year. Sales of individual pieces are more flexible, but the standard price for one exclusive material is €300-1,000.

#5 Advertising

For now, advertising is the smallest revenue stream of The Kyiv Independent. It’s mainly Ukrainian companies or Ukrainian departments of foreign firms that bring a few thousand dollars a month. Shevchenko thinks that if it weren’t for the war, the balance of power would be very different: more commercial revenue, slower membership, and less interest in syndication. “Maybe we wouldn’t be profitable and would just break even, relying heavily on donor funding. In general, a bet was made on these sources of income before the war”, she says.

The diversification of the income sources seems to work, even though some colleagues recommended focusing on one stream at the beginning, Shevchenko recalls. According to her, there is a risk in the chosen strategy. The Kyiv Independent CEO confirms that the company relies on donor’s assistance as a financial cushion, but if the publisher conditionally stopped earning tomorrow, it would be enough for about three years of work at the current level of expenses

“The biggest risk for us is the cessation of growth. It is very difficult to find people with the right combination of skills, who know the Ukrainian context, speak Ukrainian or at least Russian, speak English fluently, and are professional journalists [or] editors. This is our priority right now because, without the development of the team, our money will depreciate”, Shevchenko says.

In turn, Parusiński sees the risk in membership churn: “Before February 24 we just needed funds to launch a media start-up, which is never an easy task. Right now, given our reliance on reader revenue, the main risk is the cost-of-living crisis in many Western countries. More generally, the overall economic downturn is leading people to cut subscriptions. Of course, the advertising market is also not looking too promising at the moment, so we need to be careful not to lean too much in this direction”.

Sustaining growth as the world’s attention to Ukraine wanes

Because of the war, March was an absolute record month for The Kyiv Independent website, which went live only 2 months before February 24th. Today over 90% of The Kyiv Independent readers outside of Ukraine, a proportion that was lower before the war.

As the international audience’s attention turned to other topics in late spring and early summer, The Kyiv Independent’s traffic was steadily falling – until July when the team managed to reduce the churn. According to Rudenko, the publisher saw 3.6 million page views in October. 

“Just for comparison in Kyiv Post, the traffic spike was registered in Euromaidan period in 2014, and all years after that up until 2021 we couldn’t reach that number again, even close to it. Our situation is unusual and I’m really proud of us that after such a spike and downfall we’ve returned to stable growth, which is also our goal”, The Kyiv Independent’s Editor-in-chief told The Fix.

In May the number of people we gained was shrinking and we were also losing some people who joined us in March. They wanted to help Ukraine or KI, but not necessarily for the long term. We’ve started implementing a whole new membership strategy and started growing again, reaching our peak by the end of August with more than 7,200 members. Right now we have around 7,600, beating the record again

Chief Development Officer Zakhar Protsiuk told The Fix

The number of paid subscribers increased by 6% in less than four weeks after our conversation, so the record was beaten again.

Protsiuk also revealed the key changes in the membership strategy that brought positive results: 

• New acquisition approach: the team significantly increased social media callouts to become The Kyiv Independent patrons
• Each article was supplemented with a note from the author asking people to become patrons. 
• Pop-up banners on the homepage – standard and special, adjusted for a concrete occasion (for example, Ukraine’s Independence Day)
• Encouraging the team members to promote KI’s membership among their social media audience who have their audience to use it to promote membership. 
• Launching regular sprints with specific goals. For example, the team launched a weekly sprint to get to 7000 members by the end of August (they were 144 members short of this goal). In one week, they managed to acquire 349 members and get to 7205 members by the end of the month.

In June The Kyiv Independent brought the weekly newsletter to the members back in refreshed format after two months of pause. Moreover, the team started organising exclusive online events for the members in different formats: 

“For example, there is a Story Spotlight, where the author of a chosen material explains the story around it. In its first edition, the author of the International Legion investigation explained why we decided to write it, what was the context, and the pressure we were getting due to it. We saw a lot of engagement, people are actually interested behind the scenes. Another type of event was a Q&A with Illia Ponomarenko. We also started to invite outside guests: Kristian Boris from Saint Javelin discussed the role of memes in war”, Protsiuk told The Fix.

The events are being recorded, and members can watch them on demand. The main goal of the events is not the acquisition but retainment of existing members.

Developing the team and moving forward

The company’s CEO defined in October the current stage of development as the growth phase with the finalising institutionalisation. At that moment The Kyiv Independent team had 32 members; one-third of the team had been hired since February, during the war. 

Currently, there is a newsroom with a semi-detached news department that operates 24/7. The team is looking to hire separate people for the news department. There is the Editor-in-chief, her deputy, two senior editors, and heads of departments – investigations, video, and reporters. Production of podcasts is outsourced to the British company Message Heard; The Kyiv Independent is responsible for their content.

Shevchenko leads the business team, with Parusi?ski and Protsiuk as her deputies. There’s also a community manager and commercial producer. In the business team, there are plans for separate marketing and commercial departments, with at least one sales manager. Currently, The Kyiv Independent outsources advertising sales to the Infopoint agency. There are also executive and newsroom assistants.

The Kyiv Independent has been cooperating widely with other Ukrainian and international companies, both media organisations and other businesses. In an interview with The Fix, Chief Development Officer broke cooperation down to:

#1 Support of other Ukrainian media outlets

The Kyiv Independent invests a lot of resources into promoting GoFundMe for Ukrainian media launched by The Fix, still displaying it on the website and sharing it on social media.

#2 Mentorship

In the summer the team received mentorship support from The Guardian Foundation and Norwegian Aftenposten. This helps pick up insights about building the organisation and scaling.

“Partnerships are going to be an important way of our growth. For example, software partnerships are crucial – Chartbeat provided analytics software to us for free, which we really appreciate. We also partnered with BeyondWords, whose technology turns our texts into audio.”, Protsiuk said.

Asked about the plans of The Kyiv Independent for the next year Rudenko, Shevchenko, Protsiuk, and Parusi?ski converged on the main goal – growth. This requires: 

• Growing the audience and retaining it, making sure that new users become long-term Kyiv Independent readers and supporters.
• Growing revenue – by the end of 2022, they’re planning to reach 10,000 paid members. In the next year, two more income streams are planned to be developed as well
• Launching new products and formats (podcasts and video are the two growth areas leadership team mentions most often)

In the history of The Kyiv Independent’s first year of operation, there is no place for randomness. Their success is the result of the hard work of a talented team who put journalistic values ​​as the highest priority. It is hard to imagine what the Ukrainian media landscape information would look like without them. But everything worked out, and a successful media organisation speaking with a Ukrainian voice was created. 

However, the next global goal is already set up: becoming the main English-language publisher in the whole Eastern European-Central Asian region. “The Kyiv Independent will always be Ukraine-first, but at the same time, we want to explore other regions as well. We already have regular coverage of Belarus; by now we are the only media outlet that regularly covers the situation there in English. When The Kyiv Independent moves into regional scale, all our content formats will follow on that”, Rudenko said.

Source of the cover photo: Kostiantyn Chernichkin, courtesy of The Kyiv Independent

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