Launched on November 11th 2021, just three months before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kyiv Independent (KI) is four years old today. The award-winning English-language media outlet covers Ukraine and Eastern Europe for the rest of the world, and is celebrating its birthday with a campaign designed to boost its membership from 22,000 to 25,000 by the end of the year.
KI’s original newsroom was staffed by journalists fired by The Kyiv Post, after its owner decided he wanted more control over the 30-year-old publication’s editorial direction. “That was an incredibly stupid moment to do that,” KI COO Zakhar Protsiuk told The Publisher Podcast. “Losing an English-language voice from Ukraine was not a good idea.”
Without a fully-staffed newsroom, the Kyiv Post stopped publishing for a few weeks, opening the door for the newly-founded KI to take over its English-language audience. “We had to move really fast,” says Zakhar. “The first product was Ukraine Daily, a daily newsletter. The website came a bit later. We launched our membership model on Patreon to move things fast.”
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, KI attracted global attention. “We suddenly became one of the largest journalistic voices out of Ukraine,” says Zakhar. “In a matter of weeks our Twitter followers grew from 30,000 to 2 million. A lot of people started referring to the Kyiv Independent for what was happening on the ground.”
Over the last four years, the original staff of 18 has grown to 80, with the paper’s newsroom expanding quickly to meet the demand for information from Ukraine. “We started expanding significantly on the journalism we were doing. We started doing frontline coverage, hardcore frontline coverage and that, to this day, remains one of our big, different, unique things.”
Beyond the war
As critical as KI’s frontline journalism is to helping people outside Ukraine understand what is happening in the war, it is not just a war-time endeavour. Zakhar says: “It was never intended to be a project during the war, for the war. That just happened to be what happened to us.”
It’s impossible to separate the publishing operation from the war, however. Besides its war reporting, KI has an investigations team reporting on Russian war crimes and making documentaries, with its most recent exposing Russian militarisation of Ukrainian children.
However, KI also covers many of the same beats that a news organisation anywhere would cover, including business, culture and even the Dare To Ukraine travel show. “We want to be a paper with a centre in Kyiv, with a centre in Ukraine, that brings a lot of valuable journalism [about] the region,” says Zakhar.
With an eye firmly on the post-war future, Zakhar’s mission is growth, and the fourth anniversary campaign is just the latest effort to build reader revenue, which accounts for 70% of KI’s income. At the heart of the campaign is a membership-recruitment drive that aims to add between 3,000 and 5,000 members as part of a continued shift away from the project’s initial donations-driven model.
An early crowdfunder has raised almost £2 million to date, but Zakhar says the team wants to move beyond the donations, explaining that while they have been essential to keep KI running, it’s hard to build a business around them. “You need to rely on a steady stream of funds,” he says. “It was a strategic decision in summer 2022 to stop promoting donations and focus on building our membership.”
Donations now account for just 20% of KI’s funding and Zakhar explains: “Our model is a bit like the Guardian, where our journalism is available for free, but people can buy a monthly subscription to get a few extra things.” Members benefit from a range of extras, from exclusive newsletters to Ukrainian lessons.
Global audience, global strategy
Zakhar acknowledges that the biggest motivation to sign up for a KI membership is to support their work, and reader campaigns have become a major focus for KI’s growth strategy. “We used to do them once a year,” says Zakhar. “This year, we’re doing it twice. It’s a very effective way to focus attention.”
He credits Danish membership-funded news business Zetland with inspiring the campaign strategy. “They are our good friends. We took their idea, but we adapted it for our realities.”
The concept is simple – set a goal, make it public, and launch a few weeks of very active campaigning around that goal. Zakhar says that for every campaign, the team launches a counter on the KI website to show the total number of members. “I get addicted myself,” he laughs.
KI also partners with other publishers to help get its message out. “We essentially want to be friends and partners with other publishers who have similar values.” He explains that if they want to write a story about Ukraine, screen a documentary from KI or write a story about its work, they will help. “And if [they] want to make a call to action to [their] audience, we would appreciate that. Those sorts of things really help us build connections in different countries.”
With a global audience, a broad international perspective is crucial for KI. Zakhar says for its last campaign, the team selected the 10 countries with the largest member base. For each country, they used geo-targeting to deliver targeted messaging on the KI website.
He explained that although the US accounts for the largest number of KI members, Denmark is first on a per capita basis. “We told our readers in Denmark, ‘You are the first in the world’. For people in Sweden, who are second in the world, we told them ‘You are second. Maybe you want to beat Denmark’.”
KI has also released a live ‘Membership Map’ that allows members to drop a pin showing where they are. The map currently shows almost 9,000 pins at a city level – from Reykjavík to New York, from Oslo to Odessa. “We did a whole campaign around that map. We found it to be one of the most effective instruments for us to grow our base of supporters and members.”
This November, the Kyiv Independent turns four and launches a membership campaign to reach 25,000 members. Learn more about becoming a member here.
Long-term diversification
Reader revenue accounts for the majority of KI’s funding, but 30% comes from a diverse mix of sources. Discounted for members, their online store sells a range of branded merchandise, from T-shirts, hoodies, caps and tote bags to sticker packs inspired by its ‘WTF is wrong with Russia?’ newsletter.
This year, KI also joined the print revival by publishing ‘The Power Within’, a coffee-table style magazine of original stories detailing the experience of living and fighting through the war. More prosaically, and probably way more profitably, KI now generates 5% of its revenue from content syndication, supplying news aggregators including Bloomberg and Yahoo.
A separate research arm, KI Insights, offers custom research services, providing subscribers with an inside perspective on Ukraine’s political and economic developments and the country’s ‘road to reconstruction’. Taking inspiration from Politico and The Economist Intelligence Unit, Zakhar says KI Insights is a future-focused bet. “It’s less emotional, more service driven,” he says, “It’s one of our strategies, to have a diversified financial portfolio for the long term.”
Listen to the full conversation with Zakhar Protsiuk in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast above, or wherever you find podcasts.
