At the Audiencers’ Festival Montréal, Emilie Harkin, SVP of Growth at The Guardian, broke down what actually motivates readers to give money to a publication with no paywall.

The Guardian doesn't have a paywall, anyone can read it, whether they pay or not. So the 1.4 million people who choose to give money anyway aren't paying for access, they're paying for something else entirely

> Ownership is the product: The organisation's value proposition comes down to three words - global, independent, free. Owned by the Scott Trust, their sole purpose is to ensure The Guardian can keep publishing. It's this that's sold to readers

> One email, built entirely around that pitch, generated $2 million. When The Washington Post and LA Times pulled their 2024 election endorsements, The Guardian sent readers a simple message - we published ours, and always will, because no billionaire can tell us not to

> But it's the method that's worth noting rather than the moment: The Guardian surveys readers right after they give, with the goal of understanding the why. The top answers include protecting the free press, editorial independence, or the journalism itself

> These surfaced motivations don't just become a slide that's presented once to the team, they're used to build every single message that asks for support. They keep telling the story, deliberately and repeatedly

The Guardian doesn’t have a paywall. Anyone can read it, regardless of ability to pay. So every dollar it raises from readers is, in Harkin’s words, an elective transaction: nobody is required to give anything to keep reading. That constraint is exactly what makes The Guardian’s reader revenue data useful to anyone running a subscription business, paywalled or not, because it isolates motivation from access. People aren’t paying to get in the door. They’re paying for something else entirely.

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In the hyper-competitive world of digital media, where attention is a scarce commodity and paywalls are the standard defense, The Kyiv Independent is carving out a different path. Launched in November 2021, just three months before Russia’s full-scale invasion, this English-language newsroom has transformed from a 18-person startup into a globally recognized authority with over 27,000 paying members and 3 million monthly readers.

The secret to their impressive 78% growth in 2025 isn’t a complex algorithm. It’s a commitment to relationship-driven journalism. By treating their audience as a community rather than a series of transactions, they’ve maintained an average monthly churn rate of just 1.64%, significantly lower than the industry average.

Membership Growth Manager, Yana Zhuryk,  spoke at Audiencers’ Festival in Hamburg to share some of the relationship-building strategies that the Kyiv Independent uses to build a loyal, high-growth membership community.

You can access Yana’s full presentation at the bottom of this article.

Key takeaways to copy & share Copy

> The Kyiv Independent launched in November 2021, three months before Russia's full-scale invasion, and now has 27,000 paying members and 3 million monthly readers, with monthly churn at 1.64%

> They tested a polished promotional acquisition email against a personal one written by a team member. The personal version drove three times the conversions

> Membership is positioned as keeping journalism free for everyone rather than unlocking a paywall. Members submit questions the newsroom answers in articles, and the team replies to member emails within 24 hours

> Geotargeted appeals turn a global audience into neighbourhoods. One campaign challenged Swedish readers to overtake Danish ones as top per-capita supporters, and paying members can add a pin to a public map

> As membership growth manager Yana Zhuryk puts it: "Retention is not only about content. It is about responsiveness and presence"

1. Humanizing the newsroom

Instead of hiding behind a corporate brand, the Kyiv Independent puts its journalists at the center of its marketing. They understand that in an era of disinformation, trust is built between people, not institutions.

The “Authenticity Wins” email strategy: In late 2025, the team tested two types of acquisition emails. A polished, promotional version was pitted against a personal, storytelling email written by a team member. The personal version drove 3x more conversions and saw significantly higher open and click-through rates.

Visible experts: Field reporters like Francis Farrell are the “faces” of the brand, appearing in trench-side YouTube videos and personal newsletters that provide a “behind the scenes” look at reporting under fire.

2. Radical transparency and participation

The Kyiv Independent invites its members into the newsroom’s journey, making them feel like stakeholders in the mission of independent journalism.

Participatory content: Through their “Our readers’ questions” series, members can submit questions that the editorial team then answers in dedicated articles.

A “No-Paywall” community mission: They position membership not as a key to a locked door, but as a way to keep information free for everyone. This value-aligned positioning resonates deeply with their core audience. However, the team doesn’t shy away from campaigns to acquire new members

Direct interaction: The team maintains a Discord community for real-time engagement and commits to answering member emails within 24 hours.

3. Hyper-local geotargeting

Rather than a one-size-fits-all global appeal, they use geotargeted campaigns to create a “neighborhood” feel within their global audience.

Customized appeals: They create country-specific CTAs, such as challenging Swedes to overtake Danes as the top per-capita supporters.

Some of these are built in the Poool Dashboard and targeted based on the user’s location and level of engagement.

Interactive community maps: Paying members can add a pin to a digital map, visually demonstrating the global scale of the collective effort.

Relationships at the heart of the business model

The success of the Kyiv Independent offers a powerful blueprint for the future of sustainable publishing. By achieving a 25,000-member milestone by the end of 2025, they proved that even in a climate of “news fatigue,” audiences will show up for a brand that shows up for them. Their journey suggests that the most valuable metric isn’t just how many people read a story, but how many feel a personal stake in the newsroom’s survival. 

As Yana notes: “Retention is not only about content. It is about responsiveness and presence”. For publishers looking to thrive in 2026 and beyond, the lesson is clear: building a loyal community isn’t a marketing side-project, it’s the foundation of the business itself.

Find Yana’s slides (39-49), part of the “Community-building” panel, from our Hamburg Festival here:

ViewDownload

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Whilst donation models revolve around voluntary support and often don’t involve blocking content with a paywall, this doesn’t take away from the need for dedicated landing pages as well as banners, pop-ups or closable walls to gain financial support.

In particular: a strong value proposition. No more “Support us today!” Instead, convince readers of your value, highlight your unique take on a topic and prove that you’re worth supporting.

To inspire the designing of these modules and definition of your value proposition, we’ve collected screenshots from leading donation-led publishers around the world.

Below the main benchmarks, we’ve shared a variety of examples from The Guardian, the British publisher who is widely recognized for their success in a donation model. What works particularly well for them is their work on continuously changing and testing the messaging on promotional modules, adapting to news cycles and key moments in their readers’ diary. You can read more about how they’ve developed their proposition over the years in this summary from our London Festival in 2024.

Donation landing pages and promotional modules

The Guardian

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For a long time, donations were presented as a nice little extra source of income, reserved for radically committed media outlets, cannibalizing subscriptions, and condemned by the sociology of age. However, in France, as in several European countries, donations are experiencing unprecedented growth. They’re increasing turnover for both established and emerging publications, as well as attracting younger audiences.

So why is the media industry struggling to take donations seriously? Well, because of stubborn preconceptions and a lack of concrete examples…

From The Guardian to Vert, La Croix, StreetPress, and Kometa, here’s what the facts show when we lift the veil – a model that appeals to publishers, mobilizes new readers, and finances open, accountable journalism in the public interest.

At The Audiencers Festival in Paris, we explored the donation model with Médianes, a studio that helps media outlets strengthen their editorial, economic, and technical independence with a 360° approach. The round table brought The Guardian, La Croix, and Kometa together to discuss acquisition and conversion, followed by a workshop where Médianes shared best practices for campaigns, with use cases from Vert and StreetPress.

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Launched in November 2021, The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s fastest-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 Audiencers that we highly recommend you check out!).

> The Kyiv Independent takes 70% of its revenue from readers while keeping all journalism free. Membership runs from 5 to 100 dollars a month, and there is no paywall anywhere

> Members went from 6,000 in spring 2022 to 14,500 by January 2025. Average churn in 2024 was 1.8% and lifetime value runs well beyond a year

> Their working assumption is that the acquisition engine slows every six months and needs something new. An anniversary campaign with a public counter and shared target added 1,600 members in a month

> They built their own membership system to leave Patreon and GoFundMe, wanting first-party data and control of the infrastructure. Bringing it on-site also let them reintroduce one-off donations

> Benefits are not why people give. Trust and mission are. So the appeals explain what an air siren sounds like without ever shaming readers or threatening to close

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 crowdfunding! 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.

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For our second event in London, The Audiencers’ Festival on June 21st dived into the digital reader revenue models of publishers from no fewer than 7 countries around the world, sharing their solutions to some of the challenges being faced across the industry.

Up first, The Guardian’s Jim Scutt and Julia Hinds captured the audience’s attention by revealing how the publisher famous for huge success in gaining reader support has developed their reader revenue strategy and proposition.

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Montreal-based La Presse is a unique news organization. Long-time property of the Desmarais family, the legacy daily, which famously ditched its print edition for an iPad-only app in 2015, became a non-profit in 2018 and launched its philanthropic program a year later. The move stunned many observers -myself included- in Canada. 

Five years into their new model, the daily is stronger than ever. I worked many years alongside Florence Turpault-Desroches, Vice-President of Communications and Philanthropy, as a journalist and managing editor at La Presse. 

We caught up, and she took me through the steps of their unique formula: philanthropy, advertising, and high engagement of their readers.

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Craig Law, Product Marketing Manager at The Guardian, spoke at ACE's Subscriptions Seminar this November about the British publisher's "12for12", Guardian Weekly, campaign. The project led to an impressive 2,754 new subscribers, reigniting their previous 6for6 offer, as well as better supporting retention efforts as readers had longer to build a habit.

The context

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