The Why’s Russian YouTube audience has been steadily growing since the channel launched in March of this year. The channel has reached 250,000 viewers with a total of 16,200 hours watched across nine countries with both majority and minority Russian speakers. Meanwhile, Russian Media Watchdog Roskomnadzor is doing everything in its power to stop the flow of reliable information into Russia and bordering countries.

Right now, top viewership numbers are coming from Kazakhstan (83,081 views), Ukraine (60,839), Georgia (22,694) and Belarus (18,438). Roskomnadzor plays a major role in restricting and censoring media in most of these countries.

In Kazakhstan, an investigation by MediaZona revealed that the watchdog blocked certain independent Central Asian media websites and sent warnings to Russian-speaking press services, demanding that they remove various articles related to the war in Ukraine. They also blocked websites using the word ‘war’ to refer to the invasion of Ukraine, rather than ‘special operation’.

In Belarus and Ukraine, Roskomnadzor has blocked any websites it sees as critical of Russia. This includes the website for the Belarusian Association of Journalists, and the Ukrainian website Istorychna Pravda - an online publication for sociology, history, and science. Russia deems both of these sites ‘extremist’. As it stands, there is almost no online media critical of Russia in these countries that has not been picked up and blocked by Roskomnadzor, and Russian speakers are increasingly forced to use VPNs to get factual and objective information.

This is why making films accessible online in Russian continues to be so important - but Roskomnadzor is now making this even more difficult by blocking google ads, making it difficult for us to get traffic onto the channel.

The Why’s YouTube manager Martin Lange explains how Roskomnadzor poses a new challenge for the channel:

“Our work with the Russian YouTube channel is hampered by our inability to promote the channel through ads in Russia. Last year Google stopped selling ads in Russia because the Roskomnadzor demanded it after people started using ads to counter Russian misinformation about the war in Ukraine. For us this means we have to grow the channel organically through word-of-mouth, and it just takes a long time.”

To learn more about the project, click here.