As Ukraine’s leading independent digital news publication, Ukrainska Pravda relied mainly on advertising revenue for their 25-year history, but Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine forced them to shift strategy. In 2020, they launched a voluntary membership model, UP Club, and received some international donor funding when the war began, but neither could outpace the dwindling advertising revenue of wartime. “We needed something more scalable, and a paywall would allow us to have this scalability,” explains Andrey Boborykin, Ukrainska Pravda’s executive director.

“It was a hard decision to make,” Boborykin continues. “Part of the DNA of Ukrainska Pravda was to be open to anyone who wants to read verified independent journalism. But, at the same time, we understood that we needed long-term reader revenue to succeed.”

Ukrainska Pravda began working with Google in 2025 to implement their paywall, but they needed full insight into audience behavior first. For this, they used Google News Consumer Insights to identify that just over 6 percent of users generate 68 percent of total pageviews, leading them to create a 10-article meter threshold for their paywall.

However, paywalls are still uncommon in Ukraine. After launching theirs in April 2026, criticism appeared on social media and organic traffic suffered. “You had a publication that was free and open for 26 years,” Boborykin recounts, “and now it becomes at least partially closed, so it was obvious there would be negative feelings.”

The team pivoted within 10 days to soften the paywall and restore full public access to breaking news and investigations. “Now the paywall only covers long-form content and some very exclusive pieces of news, and it seems to be working quite well,” Boborykin says.

Ukrainska Pravda also deployed Readers’ Engagement and Monetization Platform (REMP), an open-source framework developed by Slovakian news outlet Dennik N in collaboration with Google. “It's important for us to be able to build on top of the products that we use, and REMP is also free if self-hosted, which matters since Ukrainian media do not have large SaaS budgets,” Boborykin explains. REMP allows the publisher to host sensitive reader and payment data locally within Ukraine.

Even with the initial pushback, Ukrainska Pravda’s paywall enrollment grew to 5,414 active subscribers within the first 90 days of launch, including more than 900 prepaying for annual plans and around 110 paying the top-tier rate. Today, that number is close to 8,000 subscribers, and they expect to reach their short-term goal of 10,000 subscribers, covering 20 percent of the editorial budget, by the end of 2026.

Meanwhile, Boborykin’s team will share their learnings with other Ukrainian publications through training sessions and as an implementation partner for Google’s Audience and Revenue Lab. They also plan to deploy Google’s Reader Revenue Manager to work alongside REMP to handle international payments, enabling them to better serve Ukrainians living abroad.

“I think that a lot of publishers, both local and national, are looking very closely right now at how our paywall works out,” Boborykin says. “And I think that once we hit 10,000 subscribers, we'll see more paywalls from national publications and maybe more memberships and reader revenue initiatives from local publishers. We are shifting the culture, and that’s the very first step in being successful.”