Crowdfunding Sites Finance Ukrainian Journalism

Ukrainian journalists have been looking to the crowdfunding site Patreon to help finance their own coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war, the Financial Times reported Saturday (April 16).

This includes Olga Rudenko, the editor of The Kyiv Independent, who fled the capital to go to western Ukraine in response to the possibility of having to work from a bomb shelter without good internet.

The conflict, started in late February by Russia, has ravaged the local economy there, but Rudenko’s Kyiv Independent has been doing well.

The success is partly due to the operations being funded by Patreon. The site’s user base has a core of musicians, authors, artists and filmmakers, and journalists have been taking advantage of it, too — the Kyiv Independent makes more than £50,000 (nearly $65,300) every month, per the report.

The FT noted that the funding goes toward covering higher operating costs like equipment and insurance. The Ukrainian publication’s Chief Financial Officer, Jakub Parusinski, said war reporting is “really difficult and really expensive,” so the funding was needed.

Rudenko and Parusinski hoped to get around 30% to 40% of their revenue before installing a paywall or membership, but Parusinski said crowdfunding got them “probably twice that.”

According to the FT report, the publication was set up last November. It’s gone from 32,000 page views in January to 7.5 million as of March, with 20 editorial staff doing reporting on the ground and doing social media updates.

That led Rudenko to say there’s a greater responsibility “to get everything right” than there was before.

PYMNTS wrote that video hosting site Vimeo has been telling some of its habitual users that they’ll have to pay sometimes thousands of dollars more per year to host their videos on the site — or else they’ll be kicked off. Many of them were Patreon users.

Read more: Vimeo Raises Rates on Creators, Many of Them Patreon Users

Lois van Baarle, a Netherlands-based digital artist, began making Patreon content in 2020, which was hosted on Vimeo. In March, she got the notice that her bandwidth was reportedly “in the top 1%” of the users on the site — so she’d need to go for a new plan for $3,500 a year.

Many other creators got similar notices, the report said. Vimeo said it was addressing the issue and wouldn’t raise rates “across the board.”