In 2021 four other media outlets from Moldova, supported by IJC, increased their online audience. Some of them became success stories for other editorial offices in the region
The media partners of the Independent Journalism Center within the “Understanding Audience through Digital Assistance” project – CU SENS, Media TV, Vmeste and BAStv – alongside international experts Alexei Terehov and Serge Sakharau, shared their experience of broadening their audience, increasing revenues and improving the content in 2021. The event took place online on the 23rd of September 2021.
During the period of April-August 2021, the foreign experts conducted several rounds of online consultations with the four media partners to find out their needs and provide consultancy depending on each media outlet’s particularities in terms of increasing the audience and revenues. Thus, Alexei Terehov and Serge Sakharau spent several days in the virtual editorial offices of the project’s media partners, offering them suggestions and recommendations.
The founder and editor-in-chief of CityDog.by from Minsk, Belarus, Serge Sakharau, who is for the second consecutive year the media expert of the “Understanding Audience through Digital Assistance” project, discovered valuable media projects in Moldova this year as well — projects that are worth presenting as success stories to the media outlets from the neighboring countries. “I am impressed every time when I see how media outlets start achieving their objectives and making progress in growing their audience. Having worked for the second year with Moldovan media outlets and having seen their dedication and inspiration to work on achieving their goals, I have started to present some Moldovan media outlets as success stories to our colleagues from other countries. They implement appropriate audience growing initiatives that bring the expected result”, said Serge Sakharau.
Alexei Terehov, media expert from Russia, presented briefly the project activities and underlined four important elements that help grow the audience – visualizing, monetizing, developing the YouTube channel and storytelling, paying increased attention to the latter. “Each media outlet should have as many heroes as possible — ordinary people close to us, who have an impressive story, worth showing to the public. These are the heroes who make things change in a media outlet and grow its audience. It is hence very important for each editorial office to have more such characters, who should be brought into the spotlight”, the expert believes.
Irina Sterpu, project manager at CU SENS says that experts have provided valuable consultancy and helped the editorial office focus its efforts on growing the audience. “We have started to understand our audience better, keep it on our side, and use the advertising tools more efficiently. In particular, we use GOOGLE Ads to grow the number of visitors on our site that was developed this March. We also used YouTube. We managed to draw the Russian audience by translating the most important video investigations. At the end of the project we made a video to promote CU SENS media project, which is popular and helps us promote values on the media market of the Republic of Moldova”, said Irina Sterpu.
Participation in this project meant a new chance for Media TV from Cimișlia — a media outlet with 25 years of experience. “Thanks to this project we have managed to change the working methods and introduce novelties in our editorial processes. We used to feel comfortable using the traditional TV format and did not care who watched us. But times have changed. We are living in a different era now, with other conditions forcing us to change our approach to the audience. Under this project, we’ve managed to digitalize our video archive for 1996-2006, which is more than 1,000 hours converted into digital format. But we still have many nostalgic people, who want to see their materials published as they used to do it two decades ago. We monetized this service, which has started to yield benefits now”, said Andrei Bargan, Director of Media TV.
In 2021, Vmeste portal from Cahul received a developmental boost and has become an important source of information for Russian speakers in the South of the country. “This project was a starting point for us, like launching of a small rocket that hopefully will become a successful media project in the future. This year we have achieved positive results for all indicators set at the beginning of the project, even exceeding some of the indicators, which makes us optimistic. Given the audience reached and experience accumulated this year by implementing the experts’ suggestions, we trust that our project is viable and Vmeste has real chances to become a press institution of reference for Russian-speaking media consumers from the South of the country”, believes Ștefan Boitan, portal director.
BAStv portal from Basarabeasca also established an ambitious objective – to become an important online source of information not only for Basarabeasca, but also for other regions in the South of the country. “BAS TV has been present on the Moldovan media market for more than 20 years now, but we have started to enter the online environment only now. This project helped us attract an online audience and, most importantly, gain its loyalty. With experts’ support, we made the first steps in this regard — we increase the volume of media content, diversified it, created new sections, launched the Romanian version of the site. The online development and broader audience also helped us test some site monetization tools. We are realistic and are aware that we will need more time to get concrete results in this regard, but it is important that we’ve made the first steps in the right direction”, said Ludmila Topal, editor-in-chief at BAStv.
Representative of Internews, Sasha Skotarenko, spoke about the encouraging results obtained by media partners in terms of broadening the audience and increasing the revenue. “At the same time, I have to admit that I am very much impressed by the fact that you have managed to change some practices, test new tools and working methods in your editorial offices and are already gaining results. This both inspires and makes us happy”, concluded Sasha Skotarenko.
In 2021, the four media outlets received grants amounting to EUR 5,000 each to implement initiatives focused on increasing the audience and revenues.
Overall, during 2018-2021, 16 media outlets from the Republic of Moldova received financial support and professional consultancy in broadening their audience and strengthening their financial independence.
“Understanding Audience through Digital Assistance” project is implemented by the IJC with the support of Internews and financed by Sweden. The project aims at contributing to improving the quality of media content and the financial sustainability of media institutions through a better understanding of the public’s needs.
