Crowdfunding Sites Finance Ukrainian Journalism | PYMNTS.com

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…
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