Launched in November 2021, The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s fasted-growing English-language media outlet. Today, with a community-focused membership model, 70% of revenue comes directly from reader support.
To dig deeper into this impressive strategy, we spoke to Chief Operating Officer, Zakhar Protsiuk (who also happens to be Co-Founder and Managing Editor at The Fix, a B2B media similar to The Audiencers that we highly recommend you check out!).
The birth of Ukraine’s English-language, independent digital media, just at the right moment
“The Kyiv Independent is a digital publication based in Kyiv, creating and sharing journalism in English. So, we don’t target Ukrainians per se. Our main value proposition is for the world to understand what’s happening in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
We are very young, founded 3 years ago, in November 2021, when the owner of a previously large English-language publication in Ukraine fired the whole team… It used to be a very good independent media, so Ukraine was in need of a new one, and that’s how we came to be.
By this time, there were already conversations that Russia might invade Ukraine and launch a full-scale invasion. So it was very important for us to move fast.
In February 2022, when the invasion actually happened, we very quickly became the essential English-language voice on-the-ground in Ukraine. Our work was followed and shared by thousands of other publications, we were quoted by top politicians around the world and our following on X grew from 30k to 2M.
So with this influx of attention, our goal was to rise to the challenge of doing this work during the war, build a community and of course find a way to build a sustainable business model.”
A solid, diversified business model
“Right from the beginning we put an emphasis on reader support. We started with a big crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe, a simple way to kick things off. Alongside this we had a membership in the form of Patreon, the fastest and cheapest way to do it at the time. Plus we got a few grants and started doing advertising right from the beginning.
With the start of the war, the number of supporters went through the roof – tens of thousands of people supported our crowfunding! But more than anything, this gave us confidence in what we were doing.
However, we understood that donations in and of themselves were not the answer. We wanted to put the emphasis on membership, to build relationships with these supporters, provide benefits and a community, and encourage them to donate on a regular basis.”
Membership for The Kyiv Independent
“For us, membership means that our journalism remains free, without a paywall on content. This is important during the war – our mission is to help others understand what’s happening here – but also because we’re a young publication, so we wanted readers to get acquainted with the brand.
With a membership, a reader can support us from $5 to $100 a month, getting a few benefits in exchange, which have of course evolved over the years.
For example an exclusive weekly newsletter highlighting key stories, events, etc. plus more unique things, like book or cinema recommendations, discount on our merch that we just launched, and even access to Ukrainian language lessons! There’s actually a huge interest for this and we created a discord channel for them to talk amongst themselves.”
Today, donations and membership make up 70% of our revenue.
“But the goal is to keep diversifying too of course, to not be reliant on this – for instance we now have an ecommerce stream which already looks quite significant, programmatic advertising, syndication… plus a new project called KI insights, our research arm creating B2B research products for organizations.
We’re lucky to not be reliant on US aid for instance – our Editor-in-chief wrote a piece the other day about how Trump freezing this has left 90% of Ukrainian media stranded, without money to pay for salaries. The article asks our audience to support other media in Ukraine if they can.”
Keeping membership acquisition high
“We’ve come to the conclusion that, at least in our case, the engine slows every 6 months, and something new or different is needed to reignite conversion rates.
Support pushes are placed around the website using Poool Engage, often targeted to different audiences, such as the banner for US readers above. Visibility of their membership product is high thanks to the large homepage banners, smaller banners on articles, mid- and end-of-article modules and button in the top menu.
“In spring 2022, we were at around 6,000 members. We ran a number of big campaigns and grew in less than a year to 10,000 members. That was when we built our own system to move away from Patreon, allowing us to bring membership to our own website and reintroduce one-time donations .
We also stopped relying on GoFundMe as a main source of donations – it was perfect for getting off the ground but we knew that we needed to build a centralized solution that would combine both membership and donations. We needed access to first-party data and more control over the infrastructure.
After growth plateaued again, we started doing bigger campaigns around our anniversary with a public counter on new members and a shared target. The banners for this campaign last year had significantly higher click-through rate and we went beyond the target, gaining over 1600 new members in a month.
Today, in January 2025, we’re at 14,500 members.
We also have great retention rates – our LTV is much longer than a year and our average churn rate in 2024 is at 1.8%.“
The key to all of the above, and foundation of their strategy: a strong mission, trust and emotional connection
“We have a unique, niche proposition – for English speakers to understand what’s happening in Ukraine, from people on-the-ground – and a mission that has an emotional appeal, making readers value our journalism.
Of course, member benefits are useful and help with retention, but they’re not the primary reason why someone supports us. It’s the overall brand trust, emotional connection, belief in independent journalism. I think this is maybe why we have such interest from American readers, where trust in the media is very low.”
Putting this mission into membership
“We don’t shy away from telling people that we need support, and that membership allows us to exist and grow. We don’t go into desperate mode, this is probably a one-time thing so we’ll save it for a rainy day!
When we work on new banners or new messaging we try to find a balance between showing readers the unique context of running a newsroom during the war and not sounding too desperate or undermining. For example, we would share with our readers behind the scenes of living in Kyiv during war or how it feels when Russia launches ICBM at your country but we would never shame our readers into asking for support or say that we would close shop if they won’t support us. We want to convey real emotions but don’t want to be tone deaf or “go nuclear” (pun intended) in our messaging.
This translates into our email marketing too, which is more of a letter, an editorial piece in itself – it has a lot of value whilst also asking for support.
For instance, we might explain what an air siren is, or how people from the office are told to react if we hear one. We explain, but also share how it impacts people’s lives.”
Breaking through the trust wall
“Getting a certain Joe from let’s say Texas to read a young publication in Ukraine rather than simply get information from Fox News isn’t easy – we need a lot of validation to build trust and go beyond that to convince a reader that we are a high-quality source of objective news . It’s this mission-led, impactful, human journalism that does this.
We don’t shy away from going to conferences, accepting interviews, and sharing our story – our editor-in-chief was even the first female Ukrainian to appear on the cover of Time!… all this, alongside all the classic distribution, builds up trust.”
Building a community that’s dispersed around the world
“It’s tough mixing an online and offline community, with members in so many different countries. So we just launched this new community map.
As a member, you can place yourself on the map! It means members actually see themselves as part of the community.
We also get our journalists involved in the community, regularly being updated on what’s happening by the community manager, we talk to people on discord, plus user research and non-Ukrainians being represented within the company. We actually have 35 foreigners in the team, including Brits, Americans, Japanese, an Australian…
We run community events, in-person and online, we went on a road show with our war crime investigation documentaries, including in the US to meet members along the way. So we make sure to connect in real life whenever possible. Our goal for this year is to help fellow members connect, especially those within the same city.
Some even come and visit us in the office in Ukraine! We have a top-tier member called Brad who has visited a few times and always brings food to the office! He’s met the team and built that all-important relationship that’s essential for membership.”
Thanks so much Zakhar for the interview, and congratulations to the team at The Kyiv Independent for this important, and very impressive, work.
