New Media Incubator: How a Belarusian media outlet pursued sustainability amidst severe pressure

This article was written by Backstage co-founders Pavel Petko and Yana Borisova 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.

Backstage is a Belarusian media outlet of a novel nature, tailored for an audience of young, creative individuals interested in cinema creation and popular culture.

The organization contributes to the preservation of national identity and the promotion of democratic values among Belarusian creators, who currently face significant pressure from state-backed propaganda. To mitigate the risks of site blocking, which are prevalent in Belarus, the editorial team relies on Instagram as a primary platform to engage with a young, creative audience.

It was imperative within the New Media Incubator to identify effective strategies for reaching our target audience and to test mechanisms that would foster greater engagement, as part of our work towards media sustainability. We wanted to encourage our followers to support the platform through Patreon subscriptions or membership in local or professional communities on the messaging app Telegram.

Viral video

The initial step in addressing this challenge was to master the production of vertical videos on Instagram and TikTok. We wanted to harness the virality potential of short videos, and the opportunity to achieve substantial reach among our target demographic, as a first step towards engaging them further in our community.

Our first step was to develop a strategy for creating videos featuring not only news but also inspirational narratives that had a longer lifespan than hard news and would be compelling to our target audience. This has proven to be a successful approach, resulting in the release of several viral videos that bolstered our subscriber count and engagement. Over the course of the incubator, our number of Instagram followers doubled.

Revenue generation

Deepening this engagement and cultivating a community capable of financially supporting the editorial team posed a more formidable challenge. One reason for this was the escalating risk for individuals contributing to independent media in Belarus.

During the incubator, we hosted educational events for filmmakers in the diaspora community in Lithuania, which yielded some success, growing our community and receiving coverage on local TV. But this only marginally increased reader donations.

We pivoted our approach and offered individuals the opportunity to subscribe to a free plan and receive valuable educational content for filmmakers. We offered this not only on Patreon but also through a professional, anonymous chat room on the Telegram app, in order to meet the audience’s need for privacy and safety.

Several dozen young filmmakers became subscribers to our Patreon and professional community, demonstrating a willingness to support the media in the future when conditions are deemed safer. Additionally, the local community of our media outlet in Vilnius experienced significant expansion, comprising 200 individuals from a broader spectrum of the video production industry.

Overall, participation in the incubator facilitated our editorial team’s venture into producing viral video content, which may serve as an effective tool for audience expansion in the future—a crucial aspect for us as a niche, youth-oriented media outlet. Furthermore, it allowed us to experiment with methods of engaging our core audience. This leads us to feel optimism about the opportunities for increased reader participation in funding in the future despite the enduring challenges.

Backstage Belarus 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.