This article was written by the Namir Media team and lightly edited by IPI for length and clarity. Receive regular updates on IPI’s innovation and media sustainability work by subscribing to our newsletter, The Outlook: Media Innovation Unlocked.
Namir Media is an online media outlet that provides independent political and cultural journalism for a young audience in Ukraine. With the help of IPI’s New Media Incubator, the Namir Media team was able to fully launch their startup product.
The incubator supported Namir Media from the very beginning of its establishment, as the team launched the first materials in the summer of 2023 in a test mode. The training programme from IPI helped us overcome serious difficulties, including the development of a strategy, setting the right goals and finding ways to attract a new audience.
When we first started, we had a small team of two people. They performed all the roles, from organizational and administrative to writing materials, designing and controlling the distribution of content. Thanks to the sessions with our trainer during the programme, we planned a strategy for development and interaction in the team. Currently, we have five journalists and a designer, and we continue to work on expanding the team and building proper and effective management.
Revenue strategy from an early stage
We were surprised to learn that building a successful content monetization strategy should be something we needed to consider from the very beginning.
We realized that the competent construction of each media process is the key to a stable and continuous development. We shouldn’t postpone any actions or wait until we “get more subscribers,” “launch a website,” or “update our strategy,” but rather take a comprehensive look at our project’s activities from the very start.
The biggest difficulty in applying the incubator’s lessons in practice was adapting the knowledge to the specifics of the Ukrainian media market during Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine.
Another issue we faced was that our audience, young people aged 16-24, is narrow and requires a special approach. It tends to react better to formats and content that are not traditional tools in journalism (like bulky text), so we had to change the principles we learned to the realities of working with young people.
Offline classes during the incubator in Vienna helped us learn more about our audience, their preferences and reactions. The trainer gave us a detailed guide on how to interview the audience, how to process their answers, how to look for similarities and key messages. Carrying out a practical simulation of this task during that training proved to be very valuable. After that training, we conducted our research and put the innovations into action. Almost immediately, we saw an increase in our audience engagement; improving the quality of the content led to increased engagement on our posts and helped us grow our follower count on social media.
We were happy to take part in this project. There are even more changes and opportunities ahead of us! We are glad that our work contributes to the development of civil young society in Ukraine.
Namir Media was one of the participants in IPI’s New Media Incubator, part of the Media Innovation Europe (MIE) project, co-funded by the European Commission. The programme is led by the International Press Institute, implemented in collaboration with Thomson Media, the Media Development Foundation and BIRN.
