Western sanctions are threatening the viability of TV Rain, the main privately run opposition TV channel broadcasting into Russia, one of its co-founders has said.
Vera Krichevskaya said the channel was losing between $1m and $1.5m a year in potential revenue from its YouTube platform 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.
TV Rain broadcasts news into Russia for up to five hours a day, and it is widely recognised as the most effective challenge to Vladimir Putin’s narrative of the war against Ukraine on Russian television.
The company was forced to leave Russia after the government declared it was broadcasting false information about the invasion.
It began broadcasting on YouTube, which is owned by Google, in July last year, and in one week in September, at the time of state mobilisation of the Russian population, the channel received more than 50m views.
About 65% of TV Rain’s audience is in Russia, but to comply with sanctions YouTube provides no income to TV Rain for this audience.
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.
She said there was a need for the west to address issues around how exiled private-sector journalists were able to operate viably to influence repressive authoritarian regimes, and how sanctions regimes and technology companies may help or hinder them.
“I found it very strange that when the west goes on about the importance of freedom of speech and western European values, a company like Google has no flexibility,” she said. “They give us zero income and zero profit on Russian audiences, making it near impossible to operate.”
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 calculates the loss of income at £1m or more a year, based on annualising the average number of viewers in a set period of months.
From TV Rain’s non-Russian-based audience, YouTube takes a 30% commission on donations paid through YouTube platforms and a 45% commission on screened adverts.
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.
“We tried to explain to YouTube that we are the only source of TV information that wants to stop this war and to fight the brainwashing,” Krichevskaya said. “We just asked them to help us. They said the market is cancelled in Russia and all the companies that placed commercials in the Russian market have left due to sanctions.
“It is crucial to save our independence as an organisation. If we could at least break even, we could give confidence to the company and the reporters. But at the moment we dream to break even and have to rely on fundraising, which is not that stable.”
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.”
Krichevskaya said the channel had been considering what to do if, as she expected, the Russian government banned YouTube outright. It has already banned Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, three other previous bridges for TV Rain to its Russian audience.
YouTube has suggested that in the event of a ban, TV Rain’s audiences could use VPNs, since YouTube’s algorithms would not identify them as being inside Russia.
With a YouTube innovation grant, the channel is planning within the next two weeks to launch an app with peer-to-peer technology that can overcome Russian blocking, but making the app available in Russia at a price the public can afford is hard.
Most Russians cannot pay for VPNs run by overseas companies because of sanctions, and even if they could, the kind of VPN services capable of streaming data-heavy TV videos are expensive or increasingly being blocked in Russia.
