In the internet age, running a successful news media business is a challenge in the most optimal of times. In contemporary Russia, though, it has become a mission impossible if you want to follow even the most basic ethical guidelines.

Russia’s censorship laws, which had been boiling under the surface for a while, have taken a complete dictatorial stance since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Nowadays, media outlets are getting blocked and journalists (along with other people) are threatened with long jail time for merely calling the war a “war”.

To add insult to injury, Russian authorities have been elaborating on the so-called “foreign agent” law, which casts a designation that scares off advertisers and imposes burdensome reporting requirements, and have also been dutifully expanding the list of “unwanted organisations”. The latter label, among other things, leads to freezing of the organisation’s bank accounts and compromising of people linked to the organisation.

All these reasons have heavily impacted the way Russian media outlets that decided to keep non-propaganda reporting about the war operate. Not only many media outlets had to physically leave Russia and relocate to other countries; they had to reassess their target audiences and finances in order to keep the operation running.

Here’s a brief overview of the general business trends in the independent Russian media landscape The Fix gathered through talking to several outlets, namely their financial struggles and solutions.

The money gone

The tightening censorship and the expansion of laws on foreign agents and unwanted organisations have hit media businesses and their financial streams from various angles. These are the four most widespread ones:

Advertisers fleeing

If the publisher’s website gets blocked, advertisement revenues are often the first to suffer. The Russian blog and news aggregator TJournal, known for its insights into new technology and the (often funny) depths of the Russian internet, announced in August it was closing its operations, citing the drop in advertising revenue as the main reason that crippled the project, blocked in March for posting what state censors labelled “fakes” about the war.

There are two main reasons why advertisers do not want to invest into a project. The first is an objective drop in website views – since it’s blocked, it will be more difficult for readers to access it. TJournal, for instance, at some point reported a five-fold decrease of visits to their website. The second reason is the fear of having your business linked to a media project which got blocked. The independent St Petersburg newspaper’s Bumaga said earlier in an interview with The Fix that some of its clients refused to keep buying ads as they were concerned about getting punished by the authorities for cooperating with a blocked publication.

Readers fearing consequences for financially supporting censored and banned media outlets

Fear is also present among readers. What if the authorities look into your bank transaction history and see that you, as a civilian, have supported media projects that are blocked in Russia, or, even worse, created by people and entities proclaimed to be foreign agents or unwanted organisations in Russia?

“It’s weird that we’re still getting donations [from Russia],” said Armen Aramyan, editor of the prominent Russian student magazine Doxa, noting that if their website were labelled a “foreign agent” or an “unwanted organisation”, those who financially supported the website could also feel the consequences on themselves.

Revenue freeze

Regardless of whether there are still readers within Russia who are willing to take the risk and support their beloved publications, the risk of relying on such donations is very high for publications that are operating from abroad and/or receive foreign financial support.

It also became a no-no for the prominent Latvia-based Meduza website, for which donations from Russia had earlier become a crucial revenue stream after it had been proclaimed a foreign agent in 2021 and consequentially stripped off its advertising revenues. “It’s not sustainable, it’s not safe for us to rely on revenue from inside Russia,” said for The Fix Meduza’s English side managing editor Kevin Rothrock, noting that Meduza could become an “unwanted organisation” at any minute due to its reporting on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that does not align with Kremlin’s propaganda handbook.

The war’s economic blow and sanctions

Going beyond ever more suffocating Russian legislation, independent media and their supporters within Russia have also been hit from the other side: Western sanctions against Russia, the withdrawal of foreign companies from the Russian market, and the general economic blow that Russia’s war has had on the pockets of ordinary Russians.

Several media outlets reached out by The Fix in the last months mentioned that despite gaining more followers, donations have decreased since the start of the war, noting that people can’t afford to support their outlet anymore due to the strained financial situation.

When they can afford it, it is the banking sanctions and companies leaving Russia that cross their way as it is now much harder to make transactions out of the country.

“Sanctions help the Russian state handle independent media,” said Doxa’s Aramyan. When the war started, the magazine started receiving more donations, which they soon after were not able to accept anymore, since they were collecting them through Western platforms such as Patreon and PayPal. Most of their supporters, like Doxa’s journalists, live abroad and use foreign bank cards to donate to media projects.

New ways to make a living

Several Russian independent media outlets decided to shut down or were forced to do so, but many are still up and running. These are the three main approaches they have taken to keep reporting about the war and its consequences and still make a living:

Side projects

Some media outlets opted to develop new side projects in hope of making up for a part of the lost revenues.

St Petersburg’s Bumaga created its VPN (virtual private network) service, mainly targeted at Russians who left Russia but struggle to access websites of Russian government agencies from abroad.

Its former employees also launched a new media project, named Paper Kartuli, which covers lifestyle in Tbilisi, Georgia, with the support of foreign grants that can’t be used in Russia.

Foreign supporters

Several media businesses have turned for help to non-Russian audiences.

Novaya Gazeta.Europe, the sister publication of the Nobel Prize winner Dmitry Muratov’s investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, operating from the EU, has launched a “club” membership model called “Friends of Novaya Gazeta.Europe”. For a yearly fee, its members can get access to some additional content not available on the main website.

In order to boost foreign attention, some media outlets have also launched or expanded on “English versions” of their websites. For Meduza, a pioneer in this field that started its English-language reporting in 2014, supporters from Europe and the US have become a crucial pillar of its business sustainability.

Funding from foreign institutions

Many media outlets would not be able to exist as they do now without foreign financial support, either through grants or crowdfunding campaigns.

Novaya Gazeta.Europe told The Fix that it would not have been able to operate without the financial support given by institutions such as the JX-Fund, the European fund for journalism in exile.

Helpdesk, a news startup created to help people affected by Russia’s war in Ukraine by two of former Meduza’s senior managers, raised its initial funds through a US-based firm North Base Media.

Not all media projects, however, are transparent about the size and source of such money inflows. Several outlets reached out by The Fix mentioned foreign financial support as being important for their sustainability, but tended to refrain from elaborating on it.

To survive, independent Russian news outlets are building their business models from scratch

Veronica Snoj

Advertising revenue, donations from Russian readers are being replaced by international supporters and foreign grants

Author

Veronica Snoj

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