Despite expanding censorship, funding difficulties and audience burnout, the sector of Russian relocated media showed notable resilience in 2025.
Although blocking measures reduced total visits to their websites by 22% and the slowing of YouTube led to a decline in the platform’s overall traffic, the combined number of subscribers to independent Russian media continued to grow on social networks and video platforms. On TikTok and Instagram the subscriber base doubled, and on the slowed YouTube it increased by 11%. The Russian authorities’ efforts have so far failed to achieve the desired effect owing to the widespread use of VPNs.
At the same time, in 2025 uncensored media noted growing audience burnout, meaning fatigue with negative news and the stress associated with the war and repression. The overwhelming majority of editorial teams discussed changing the tone of their output and using lighter formats in order to maintain a balance between covering the most important events and the audience’s desire for a more stable emotional environment.
The main problem for Russian uncensored media remains unstable financing. While their core audience is located in Russia, the user support available to them comes almost exclusively from the diaspora. The Russian authorities are making every effort to prevent domestic readers from offering financial support to this sector. As a result, this highly demanded media sector succeeds in covering only about 20% of its expenses through reader contributions.
Grant funding remains the principal source of financing for independent media, although their budgets are shrinking, on average by 6% in 2025, while costs are rising, primarily due to the forced relocation of editorial teams from ‘cheaper’ countries to ‘more expensive’ ones.
Russia’s uncensored public sector, which brings together independent media, bloggers, public intellectuals and experts, remains a unique phenomenon in political history for as long as the Kremlin fails to build a full Internet autarky inside Russia and sever all ties between the relocated public sphere and its remaining domestic audience.
Despite targeted efforts by the authorities including the blocking of websites and VPN services, the stigmatisation of independent media through the label of undesirable organisation and the emerging practice of prosecuting readers of banned content, the uncensored public sphere continues not only to retain but to expand its audience.
Despite increasing pressure on audiences inside Russia, the ending of USAID support programmes, the reduced activity of several private and institutional European foundations working on Russia, and audience fatigue, the sector of Russian uncensored (relocated) media demonstrated notable resilience in 2025. This is the overall conclusion of the latest, third report by the JX Fund, which supports Russian media in exile and conducts in-depth monitoring of their work (for the previous report, see → Re:Russia: Diffuse Media Landscape). This year’s study covered 63 relocated media outlets. The authors collected and analysed information on their financing, audiences, content-delivery methods, thematic repertoire and other aspects.
In the face of mounting obstacles, blocking measures and an unfavourable environment, Russian uncensored media have not only maintained but increased their audiences both inside Russia and abroad. Their function remains twofold. On the one hand, they are a vital information channel for domestic audiences. On the other hand, they serve as a source of information on Russia for the outside world. The largest of them are comparable in citation levels to leading international outlets.
Although website blocking reduced their total visits by 22% in 2025 and the slowing of YouTube led to a fall in platform traffic, the combined number of subscribers to independent Russian media continued to grow according to JX Fund. On YouTube, the surveyed outlets gained 3.77 million subscribers, an increase of 11%, reaching 38 million in total. Subscriptions to these media on TikTok almost doubled, rising by 90% to 3.6 million by year-end. The highest growth in the JX Fund sample was on Instagram, which is blocked in Russia. There, the number of subscribers grew to 10.2 million, an increase of 108%.
These findings are broadly consistent with earlier conclusions showing that blocking and bans have not led to a significant contraction of the audience for Russia’s uncensored public sector abroad (→ Re:Russia: Whitelists for Dark Times). The term Russian uncensored public sector more accurately reflects the nature of this phenomenon. In addition to media outlets, it encompasses a large number of individual bloggers, experts, public intellectuals and politicians whose content flows into relocated media and creates a broader and more coherent context for their activity. Using this broader approach, which includes not only media but individual bloggers, our calculations do not confirm a growth trend in the number of subscribers to Russian-language YouTube channels in this sector, although they do show a modest rise in views. This rise is a notable outcome in the context of a slowed service and shrinking overall audience. A similar effect linked to mass VPN use is observable on several other platforms. The sharp decline in Instagram’s audience after its 2022 blocking was followed by a substantial increase in the number of creators and apparently also in audience numbers in late 2024 and in 2025.
The core element of the infrastructure of Russia’s uncensored public sector is Telegram, used by 100% of the media outlets surveyed by JX Fund. In contrast with other platforms, Telegram showed a slight decline in subscriber numbers in 2025. Yet media staff interviewed by JX Fund reported that their Telegram views have not fallen and in some cases have grown. This indicates that users have not stopped reading independent media, although they are trying to erase their digital footprints. As in Belarus after 2020, users avoid subscribing to opposition channels for security reasons. Re: Russia’s calculations based on Brand Analytics data also indicate that Telegram user activity, measured as the number of users who have posted at least one comment, increased by roughly 60% in 2025 compared with the previous year.
However, as our previous analysis has shown, the size of the audience of Russia’s uncensored public sector depends above all on the news agenda. In moments of extraordinary events it expands sharply, which suggests the existence of a substantial peripheral audience consisting of people who use these channels irregularly and turn to them primarily in exceptional circumstances (→ Re:Russia: YouTube Window).
A survey of editorial staff conducted by the JX Fund indicates a degree of audience burnout among uncensored media, meaning a growing tiredness with topics related to the war and repression. Readers are increasingly simply scrolling past negative news, according to editorial staff. The most popular materials are those focused on personal stories and on domestic social issues such as healthcare, education, inequality and gender questions. Between 60% and 75% of respondents noted the popularity of these topics. Next in popularity among readers are investigations and entertainment or nostalgia-themed content, mentioned by 50% of respondents. News on Russia’s political and economic life and analytical pieces explaining the wider context were identified as popular by between one quarter and one third of those surveyed. Fewer than 20% mentioned materials relating to the war in Ukraine. As a result, the overwhelming majority of editorial teams have already discussed changes in tone and the use of lighter formats in order to maintain a balance between covering the most important, and typically traumatic, events and the audience’s desire for a more stable emotional environment.
Similar trends appear in findings from a study by the CEDAR Centre, conducted by Alesya Sokolova, which compared the thematic repertoire of independent (uncensored), pro-government and neutral media. On the one hand, pro-government and uncensored (anti-war) outlets devote roughly equal attention to the war in Ukraine. On the other, the thematic repertoire of censored media, both pro-government and neutral, is broader and contains more reporting on economic and social issues as well as accidents and disasters, all of which create for readers a sense of engagement with everyday life. Uncensored (opposition) media focus more on repression because, in practice, they are the only outlets able to cover it adequately. This topic accounts for about 17% of their content. In general, a more positive editorial tone correlates with greater user popularity.
The main problem for Russian uncensored media remains unstable financing. While their core audience is in Russia, the financial support they can receive from users comes almost exclusively from the diaspora. The Russian authorities are making every effort to block any potential support from domestic users, primarily through increasingly strict bans on advertising and the closure of channels for donations. For this reason, grant funding still makes up the lion’s share of the combined budget of Russian uncensored media at 78%. Dependence on grants fell by only 4% over the past year according to JX Fund analysts. Advertising revenue grew from 6% to 7% of the total budget, while the share of income from readers through subscriptions or donations remained unchanged at 10%. Revenue from ancillary activities such as events, consulting and training increased from 3% to 5%.
According to JX Fund, US funding accounted for 42% of the combined budget of Russian media abroad in 2025. At the same time, the fund estimates that the budgets of Russian media abroad shrank on average by 6% over the year. This result was achieved mainly through emergency grants from other sources. However, the overall picture appears overly optimistic. It is well known that the largest Russian uncensored outlets, such as Mediazona and Meduza, faced sharp budget cuts in the past year and that among infrastructural human-rights organisations with a strong media component OVD-Info was similarly affected. A major factor in this has been the obstruction of funding channels from domestic audiences. A further reduction of several percentage points is expected next year.
Meanwhile, media expenditure is increasing, primarily editorial costs linked to continued pressure-driven relocations from cheaper countries such as Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Latvia and Lithuania to more expensive ones. As a result, among the outlets surveyed by the JX Fund, spending on journalists’ salaries rose by 16% in 2025 and spending on commercial departments by 17%, while costs for offices, digital infrastructure, management and similar items had to be reduced.
The main challenges for Russia’s uncensored public sector and for the relocated media that form its core remain the expansion and growing effectiveness of the authorities’ efforts to combat VPN services, the emerging practice of prosecuting readers of banned content and the Kremlin’s progress in building a cheburnet, a closed sector of the Internet controlled through mechanisms of positive filtering, meaning the admission of authorised content only. For now, however, the Kremlin’s attempts to build a wall of silence around the Runet have not been sufficiently successful. This sector remains large, developed and influential and constitutes a fairly unique phenomenon in political history. Its interaction with the censored independent public sphere inside Russia could be much broader were it not for the potential risks that such engagement carries for the latter.