How Ukraine’s leading publisher Ukrayinska Pravda is growing its non-hard news coverage 

Editor’s note: this article is published as part of The Fix’s partnership with X LMF. Held annually in Lviv (Ukraine) by NGO “Lviv Media Forum”, LMF has been the biggest media conference in Central and Eastern Europe since 2013. 

There’s a running joke that The New York Times is just a gaming company now, with news sprinkled on top. Non-hard news verticals like games, recipes and product reviews are helping NYT and other publishers survive and thrive amidst news fatigue and growing competition.

In Ukraine, the country’s leading digital news publisher Ukrayinska Pravda (UP) is also moving to diversify its news coverage. Over the past six months the company purchased tech news publisher Mezha and sports outlet Champion. Executive director Andrey Boborykin says it’s important for their efforts to diversify revenue as other major sources have waned amidst declining foreign readership. 

Boborykin spoke about the publisher’s ventures into tech and sports coverage at X LMF, a recent media conference in Lviv, and shared more details in an interview for The Fix.

Surviving during a prolonged war

Ukrayinska Pravda was founded in 2000 by prominent journalist Georgiy Gongadze, who was kidnapped and murdered because of his investigations into high-level corruption soon after. Over the past 24 years UP grew to become one of Ukraine’s biggest and most important news publishers.

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, UP along with other Ukrainian publishers received a huge boost in readership. As The Fix reported at the time, it gained an unprecedented 878 million pageviews from 66 million unique visitors in the war’s first month.

The numbers have normalised since then. Boborykin told The Fix that UP now gets 120 million views from 14 million unique visitors monthly. He isn’t worried about news fatigue among Ukrainians – people aren’t as glued to their screens as two years ago, but the readership remains much higher than before the war.

What’s been a greater challenge, however, is the downturn of interest among Western readers. With the decline of domestic advertising and reader revenue in a war-torn country, UP’s English-language version has been the breadwinner for the company. Last year it brought up to 60% of overall revenue. Since October 2023, though, foreign interest has been waning, Boborykin says. This has led to drops in revenue from programmatic ads and syndication.

Ukrayinska Pravda’s new tech and sports verticals 

UP is eyeing a few new sources of revenue. Boborykin said at X LMF that the company is among the few major Ukrainian publishers to pilot successful live events. Its membership is generating 3-5% of revenue from 1800 people, offering a lot of growth potential for a publication with huge nationwide readership. (Boborykin told The Fix the company has no plans to paywall its coverage). 

Advertising, though, remains the primary source of revenue. Adding new areas of coverage will help boost ad revenue, both by monetising traffic with programmatic ads and by selling native advertising as some sectors of Ukrainian business are doing well even during the war. 

In early 2024 Ukrayinska Pravda announced the purchase of two websites. In January tech outlet Mezha joined the company. In February UP brought back Champion, a sports publisher also launched by UP founder Georgiy Gongadze shortly before his death.

Boborykin says UP initiated both deals. In the case of Mezha, a relatively new outlet launched in late 2021, its team was the asset he was most interested in. Champion also boasts a bigger archive, potentially lucrative as a source of search traffic, and has a symbolic importance due to its historic ties with UP.

The outlets retain independent newsrooms; existing journalists have kept their jobs, and UP is helping expand the teams. Boborykin says native advertising is the main source of revenue the two new verticals offer. For example, the company can now attract clients from the tech industry with Mezha or use tech as parts of a bigger bundle together with UP’s existing economic and lifestyle verticals.

“Ideally, in the long-term perspective this would replace the drops [in revenue] from the decline in Western audience and syndication”, Boborykin told The Fix.

Boborykin says the company doesn’t have immediate plans to add even more verticals now as it focuses on finalising the integration of Mezha and Champion. In the future he would like UP to add new lifestyle projects around food or health, as well as launch a product for young audiences.

Who among Western publishers does he watch for inspiration? Boborykin says The New York Times is interesting as the industry’s leader but not as relevant an example for UP because it has a different monetisation model, relying primarily on paid subscriptions rather than ads. In this sense, a better analogy is Vox Media, the company that operates multiple news brands and monetises them predominantly with advertising. 

Source of the cover photo: photo by Ira Sereda, courtesy of X LMF

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