The Ministry of Culture launched the English-language website The Gaze four months ago tointroduce the Western audience to the "phenomenon of the countries of the new Europe and Ukraine." During this time, the government spent more than UAH 60 million on The Gaze.
This is stated in the NGL.media investigation.
UAH 11.6 million was spent on the development and technical support of The Gaze platform, and the rest of the money was spent on content creation. The cost of signed contracts for video production is UAH 35 million, and text news and articles is UAH 11 million.
The Gaze hosts seven programs on its website and YouTube. Here are some of them: puppet show Hidden Angle, socio-political program Talk For More, cooking show Chefs Next Door and comedy show European Edge. All of them are produced by "Marker Media" LLC, which concluded 12 content production agreements with SE "Multimedia Platform for Foreign Language" by the end of the year in the amount of over UAH 26 million.
NGL.mеdіа
The cooking show turned out to be the most expensive — one episode costs UAH 261,000. On average, one issue collects 900 views on YouTube. In total, the mediaʼs YouTube channel now has 6.55 thousand subscribers.
NGL.mеdіа
Meanwhile, the estimated cost of creating one news item is UAH 4,000, and an article is UAH 8,500. This is a high price for the Ukrainian market, where they pay from 250 hryvnias for one thousand characters for simple text, the journalists of NGL.mеdia cite.
Also, journalists claim that a significant part of The Gaze news is a mediocre rewrite from international sites such as Bloomberg, Reuters, etc.