Business Models
How The Kyiv Independent is building a membership powerhouse – 9 questions for COO Zakhar Protsiuk
by thefixteam
Amidst Russia’s invasion, The Kyiv Independent is Ukraine’s most prominent English-language voice. It’s also a successful media business story – a sustainable outlet that makes 70% of its revenue from reader support, most notably from the community of 17,000 paying members who contribute $5 or more a month.
The Kyiv Independent doesn’t have a paywall and boasts an impressively low churn rate. How does its membership work? We chatted with Zakhar Protsiuk, The Kyiv Independent’s chief operating officer, about his organisation’s experience and advice for other publishers.
Editor’s note: this article was created in partnership with Fourth Estate, a company that offers software development for publishers, and is working with both The Kyiv Independent and The Fix. It’s part of a special print edition of The Fix for the International Journalism Festival in Perugia (grab your copy if you’re there!). Disclosure – Zakhar Protsiuk and some other members of The Kyiv Independent’s leadership team are also co-founders of The Fix.
Can you give us a sense of The Kyiv Independent’s scale? How big is your team and your audience?
We are a team of 70 people, primarily based in Kyiv, with a few people working in other countries. The newsroom is around 40-45 people.
In February, we had about 4 million unique users on our website with around 12 million page views. Overall, we reach close to 10 million people monthly across all platforms, including our website, newsletters, social media, video content, and news aggregators like MSN or Yahoo. We have highly engaged social media audiences, and newsletters are an important channel.
70% of your revenue comes from members and donations. Before we dive into membership, what are your other revenue streams?
There are quite a few. We are trying to grow and diversify, while keeping reader revenue and readers at the center.
We secure targeted philanthropic funding from partners like Microsoft, who backed our war crimes investigative team, and UNESCO for our journalism school. Philanthropic funding isn’t a big part of our budget, it’s an opportunity to find support for impactful and growth-oriented products.
We have an online store and our new print magazine. We run both native and programmatic ads and syndicate content to news aggregators. We also have KI Insights – our growing business intelligence and research unit. We are also experimenting with book publishing and content licensing.
The Kyiv Independent has 17,000 paying members. Any other high-level numbers you can share to help understand your reader revenue model?
We have a lot of people who supported us with one-time donations in our three-plus years. Over 50,000 people have financially contributed to The Kyiv Independent in some way. Our GoFundMe campaign was hugely successful in 2022 and remains an important partnership today.
At the same time, membership accounts for 80% of all reader revenue, and one-time donations are at 20%.
What’s your goal for the number of members in the future?
We set a goal of 20,000 members for this year. When we started, it felt very ambitious, but it's going faster than we thought. We began the year with 14,000 members and we’re now at 17,000.
The last few weeks have been exceptional with the big turnaround of the United States towards Russia. We did a lot of work to show our position and to rally people around supporting Ukraine both through our journalism and through other initiatives.
I'm very proud of the journalism we’ve done, and it also had a significant effect on our membership. One week saw almost 1,000 new members joining, which is unprecedented for us.
Our goal remains 20,000, but we are preparing to achieve it before year-end and aim for something bigger. Long-term, our ambition is to reach 50,000 paying members
We don't have an exact timeline for that, but it’s where we want to be in the future.
So, you’ve had sort of a Trump bump. Overall, though, what are your best practices for acquiring new members?
Our model is more or less similar to The Guardian one, where we don't have a paywall on the website, but we ask people to support us on a monthly basis, and we offer them different benefits, like exclusive newsletters, community events, discounts for our store, merch, and so on.
The best practices for us are first robust conversion on the website with punchy and clear messaging. We do a lot of adaptations of messaging depending on what's happening. We do custom messaging for specific dates and global events, for example, Ukraine’s Independence Day or talks about a partial ceasefire in the war.
Another important factor is our email marketing, which we do on a regular basis. It’s something in between journalism and marketing, where in every piece, we share unique reporting, often focused on behind the scenes of how we run the Kyiv Independent. It’s an important source of new members and also builds that relationship with people.
What worked well for us last year was the campaign for our birthday. We set a goal to get 1,000 new members in one month, which was a lot for us – on average, we were getting about 300 new members monthly. We overachieved and finished with 1,600 new members. What worked well was sharing the goal transparently with readers and explaining why membership specifically is something we'd appreciate them joining. This is something we want to do more this year – more targeted goal-setting campaigns on membership.
Let’s talk retention. What’s your churn rate and what are your best practices for retaining members?
This is something that, so far, is probably one of our strongest sides. Our churn rate last year was around 1.8%, which is significantly better than one might expect.
What we do for retention is focus on direct human interaction. We answer all emails as fast as we can. We try to really meet the members as much as possible and very often offer them one-on-one meetings.
We also do a lot of horizontal interactions. We have a very active Discord platform where over 2,000 members engage with each other. We do community events.
We recently launched a community map project where members can put a pin on a map, either sharing their name or anonymously, to show the city they're based in. Members got super passionate about it. We even had one member cancel because his town wasn't on the map – our system couldn't support all the smallest towns, and he got too passionate about it.
The brand and the journalism are central to keeping members in. We never had our Washington Post moments, and hopefully won't in the future. We have big trust from our members and readers, and we value it, and we try not to screw it up.
What’s your tech stack for membership?
We started our membership and donations on external platforms – Patreon and GoFundMe – and we've been progressing towards building our own solution over time. We launched our own membership hosted on our website back in 2023. For us, it’s been very important to have more control over our data and customer experience.
Our current setup uses Stripe as our main payment system, which works well for us. It's a trusted system, which matters since about 95% of our members are based outside Ukraine. Payment security is important, especially because members understand we’re working in a hostile environment where different parties, Russia first among them, might try to attack us.
For our tech foundation, we have a custom CMS and CRM platform built with our partners, Fourth Estate. We outsource much of our development to them. It's a mix of the open-source Ghost platform with solutions we're building on top. Their help and expertise was and remains crucial to building the Kyiv Independent at a pace and quality we expect from ourselves.
We use Chartbeat for user analytics, Mailchimp as our main email service provider, and we work with Poool, a French software company, for our registration wall and website conversion setup.
Editor’s note: this article was created in partnership with Fourth Estate. To build a thriving, financially sustainable membership model like The Kyiv Independent, you need a technology partner who understands media challenges and has a proven track record. Fourth Estate’s CMS gives you everything you need to launch, optimize, and scale your reader revenue model: integrated membership tools, built-in donation systems, SEO optimization, and more. Book a demo call or meet them in Perugia for coffee.
Any specific other organisations you are looking to for inspiration on membership?
Four news organisations we are learning a lot from are The Guardian, Zetland, Daily Maverick, and Denník N. They are our close friends and partners and their advice and knowledge have been instrumental in getting us up to speed. We are obviously sharing our knowledge and context in return. We are also looking more broadly – a few weeks ago I had a chat with the Wikimedia Foundation team that works on fundraising, we can learn from elDiario, and so on.
What's your advice for other outlets thinking about launching their own membership or subscription?
Just launch it. I’ve met many organizations that thought about it, but were waiting for some moment.
My advice would be to just launch it, but be ready to play the long game. Don’t expect that the results will come from just adding the support button on the top of your website
But don't wait for the perfect moment. If we had waited to build the perfect system before February 2022, we wouldn't have received crucial support for our journalism in that critical moment. Sometimes timing matters more than perfection – you can improve as you go.
Source of the cover photo: Diego Figone, IJF 2023
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