How the Kyiv Independent reached 20,000 paying members — with no paywall

The Kyiv Independent reached a major membership milestone last month with a global campaign telling readers “journalism needs a community, not a paywall.”

After a month-long multi-country campaign, The Kyiv Independent has more than 20,000 paying members — up from 17,500 in May. Most members give $5 a month. About 70% of the outlet’s revenue is from readers.

The Kyiv Independent was co-founded in November 2021 by a group of journalists who’d been fired from the Kyiv Post — the biggest English-language newspaper in the country — as the owner attempted to interfere in the newsroom. (The staff has grown from 18 in 2021 to 70 today, including more than 40 in the newsroom.) The Kyiv Independent tells readers it was “born out of a fight for freedom of speech” and has not shied away from honestly appraising Ukraine’s leadership during war. Just last week, the site was targeted by a DDoS attack after publishing coverage and sharp criticism of the government’s anti-corruption rollback.

The digital news outlet also gets revenue from a thriving online store selling items like a print magazine and Borshch tote bag, content syndication, advertising, and one-time donations from individuals and organizations such as Microsoft and UNESCO.

Importantly, paid members are sticking around. The Kyiv Independent has a monthly churn rate of less than 2%, growth membership manager Yana Zhuryk said. (For context: The average monthly churn for a median news outlet is 3.6%, according to INMA, meaning 67% of new subscribers stay for a year and 28% stick around for three years.)

Many readers are interested in the organization itself — a combination of a startup journey and a newsroom living through a war. The Kyiv Independent sends weekly behind-the-scenes missives (on topics like how journalists keep working through air raids) to members. The growing membership team has also achieved near-superhuman levels of responsiveness.

“We give them a lot of human connection,” Kyiv Independent COO Zakhar Protsiuk said. “Everyone who becomes a member, if they reach out to us in any form, anywhere, we have a one-on-one communication with them — whether that’s through email, Discord, meetings. We answer every single letter we receive, even replies to, like, our email marketing.”

But Protsiuk sees horizontal connections — between members, rather than from newsroom to audience — as possibly more important to the model’s success. The Kyiv Independent connects readers to each other through monthly events, its Discord, community maps, Ukrainian lessons with a language tutor, and localized campaigns. More than a third of its members pinned their location on the outlet’s community map and about 10% of its most-engaged members are active on the Discord, he said.

Almost all (about 95%) of Kyiv Independent’s paid members live outside Ukraine — with countries like the United States (accounting for about 40% of paid members), Canada, the U.K., Nordic countries, France, and Germany well-represented. A lot of the membership connections, then, happen online.

“It’s a very geographically widespread audience. Members develop an interest and understanding of what’s happening in Ukraine for different reasons. Some might have some personal connection. Others got interested during the full-scale war,” Protsiuk said. “Those segments are very different, but I think for many of them, since the international attention to Ukraine has [gotten] lower, they often don’t feel the same connection. Like, they think about this topic quite a lot, and their friends don’t. Once they become a member, we create this horizontal connection for them to feel like they have other people to discuss this [with].”

The Kyiv Independent deployed some country-specific messaging in its campaign. In Denmark, it congratulated readers for making Denmark the No. 1 country in the world in terms of paid members per capita. (“The Danes liked that.”) It also introduced some friendly competition. In Sweden, the outlet told readers Denmark was No. 1, inviting Swedish readers to step up and take the top spot.

For the membership campaign, Kyiv Independent staffers partnered with other independent outlets they felt a kinship with.

“We understand that in this unique moment of time — especially with Trump being the [U.S.] president — Kyiv Independent’s mission expands. We see a lot of the story [being about] defending democracy, and Kyiv Independent, in a way, represents that,” Protsiuk said. “It’s a larger story than just Ukraine. We see that, for example, people come and meet on our channels about North Korea, Russia, and Syria. We represent these values that we are trying to defend. We started looking for publishers that also represent those values. We want to build an informal alliance with them, and this campaign was also a way to do that.”

Research tells us news avoidance is driven, in part, by news consumers reading about suffering and injustice and feeling helpless. The Kyiv Independent has launched and fostered campaigns to combat that feeling. Earlier this year, members raised nearly $25,000 for a Ukrainian charity supporting veterans from a single newsletter and, in another campaign, members raised $66,000 for regional Ukrainian media in four days following U.S. aid cuts. Members themselves have initiated a street renaming campaign to replace the Russian spelling of Ukraine’s capital.

The Kyiv Independent does not have a paywall and has promised not to raise one during the war. The outlet recently launched a separate documentary team that investigates Russian war crimes in Ukraine. It’s also expanded culture coverage and is publishing more about surrounding regions and how Russia impacts them.

“Russia’s ambitions [are] bigger than Ukraine. They say this publicly. They will not stop in Ukraine,” Protsiuk said. He added, “We have a unique responsibility to do more work, not less.”