The Daily Beast
Putin increases RT’s advertising budget as the rating drops
Mark Schiefelbein-Pool / GettyMOSCOW – With Vladimir Putin’s popularity already declining, news of the latest round of U.S. sanctions on Russia has alarmed the Kremlin, prompting its roster of anti-American experts, advisers and ideologues to come up with several possible responses. Olga Kovitidi promised that Russia would “send America out for a blind knockout.” An expert suggested publishing Russian media lists “spreading fake news”. Certain military experts have proposed the formation of “information battalions” in cyberspace, inspired by the masked Russian soldiers highlighted in the 2014 crisis in Ukraine. Ultimately, the government has landed on a family strategy: they will try to change the perception of Russia by pouring even more money into propaganda. After the sanctions were announced, this time in response to the poisoning of opposition politician Alexei Navalny, the Russian government is reportedly aiming to expand the global audience of the Kremlin-funded RT television channel from 800 to 900 million viewers. They want to increase their audience on online platforms, promoting the internet content of the entire fleet of Russian and foreign media outlets, including RT, RIA Novosti and Sputnik radio. To achieve this, the Kremlin increased the state media budget to 211 billion rubles (about $ 2.8 billion) – an increase of 34 billion rubles ($ 460 million) over previous years. “Without a doubt, RT information soldiers will use this significant budget effectively to influence Eurosceptics, anti-globalists and Washington critics,” an opposition politician in Moscow, Ilya Yashin, told The Daily Beast. “Putin believes that if the West has its state sponsored Radio Liberty or BBC, the Kremlin should take seriously what they like to call a ‘mirror response’. This is a new stage of the ongoing Cold War. “” Don’t underestimate the growing influence of RT, “he added. Some say the media battle is twofold. Maria Baronova, a former opposition activist who covered Russian social issues for RT, was banned from American social media platforms last year. “The Cold War is going both ways. I was banned from Twitter for working for RT in April 2020. This is absurd, ”added Baronova. Russia’s opposition movement begins to split Investment in domestic advertising has already turned Russia into a nation of skeptics. In the early days of the conflict in Ukraine, 48 percent of Russians told the Public Opinion Foundation that they thought that propaganda harmed their society. According to a social study conducted by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 88 percent of young Russians aged 18 to 24 said they were on YouTube. Even the Kremlin’s most famous propagandist, Vladimir Solovyev, admitted in a recent interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda that “the television audience is aging terribly”. Young Russians are hungry for the truth, and in recent years, influential Russian YouTubers have begun to take a more open approach to their content. Russia’s leading online interviewer, Yury Dud, has 8.7 million subscribers and over 500 million views on his channel. Tens of millions watched Dud’s documentaries about the AIDS epidemic, poverty and neglect on Kamchatka, Russia’s forgotten peninsula. More than 29 million people watched Dud’s interview with Alexei Navalny shortly after the politician recovered from his poisoning attack. Despite state pressure on opposition bloggers, emerging YouTube stars are now covering some of Russia’s most serious political issues. Irina Shikhman, another popular blogger, focuses on making videos for celebrities, in which she asks uncomfortable questions to public figures about their personal lives. But some of his most popular clips are of a political nature: more than two million people watched Shikhman’s interview with Navalny ally Lyubov Sobol. Russia’s only independent online television channel, TV Rain, has 2.3 million subscribers on YouTube. The founder and owner of the channel, Natalya Sindeyeva, says she is not concerned about the increased promotion of RT by the Kremlin. “For 11 years, we have competed with state television channels without a state budget, without administrative resources, and we have succeeded, which means that money is not the main thing,” said Sindeyeva. “If they boosted social media, the algorithms would recognize artificial traffic. We see no threat, as we are experienced in responding to challenges. Our audience trusts us and independent bloggers, our main job is not to lie. Trust cannot be bought with money, ”she said. It is too early to know with certainty whether RT reports are going to hinder the independent media in Russia. “It depends on the quality of your content,” TV Rain’s chief editor Tikhon Dzyadko told the Daily Beast. Some independent bloggers saw the government’s increase in spending on Internet content as a positive sign. “It seems that the Kremlin realized that it cannot ban YouTube, so they decided to smother it with advertising,” blogger Karen Shainyan, host of the YouTube show “Straight Talk with Gay People,” told the Daily Beast. “The authorities spend a lot of money on RT, more than on any other television channel.” Pavel Kanygin, who runs a YouTube channel for Novaya Gazeta, a legendary independent Russian newspaper, says the government has begun to view social media platforms as something of a real threat. “We can see that the Kremlin is taking YouTube seriously,” he said, especially after more than 100 million people saw an investigative report on Putin released by Navalny’s organization on the website in January. “It is one thing to get clicks and another to get engaged people to comment on the publication – this is a completely different story that cannot be created artificially,” said Kanygin. 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