Co-founder says it is ‘near impossible to operate’ without YouTube ad income from viewers in Russia
Western sanctions are threatening the viability of TV Rain, the main privately run opposition TV channel broadcasting intoVera Krichevskaya said the channel was losing between $1m and $1.5m a year in potential revenue from itsplatform because sanctions meant it could not monetise adverts viewed by its Russian audience. The lack of advertising revenue leaves the outlet heavily dependent on outside donors to survive.
Krichevskaya, who co-founded TV Rain in 2010, said in an interview that she had spoken with Google and YouTube executives formally in London and informally in California in the autumn to try to persuade them to re-examine the rules, but had been unable to make progress. YouTube suspended all monetisation programmes for users in Russia after previously suspending all adverts, leaving TV Rain dependent on its non-Russian-based audience for advertising income.
TV Rain asked YouTube to reduce the size of the commissions so it could at least boost the income from non-Russian audiences, but YouTube said it could not set such a precedent, Krichevskaya said. Krichevskaya was keen to acknowledge the role YouTube played in keeping the company afloat. “At one point after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2014, TV Rain was toxic for the Russian government. All western companies stopped placing commercials with us and at the same time they fed the TV state propaganda machines right up until the full invasion on February 24th,” she said. “YouTube instead provided us with an independent platform and we got an opportunity to pay back all our loans.
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