The editorial staff of Babel lost all its paid subscribers due to a technical failure in the Monobank system. Editor-in-Chief Kateryna Kobernyk compared the situation to «the irretrievable loss of something very valuable.»
The editorial staff of Babel lost all its paid subscribers due to a technical failure in the Monobank system. Editor-in-Chief Kateryna Kobernyk compared the situation to «the irretrievable loss of something very valuable.»
She wrote about this in her Facebook post, telling the story of the publication’s struggle for survival during the war.
Kobernyk recalled that in 2022, investors and the editorial staff decided to direct the money that was going to develop Babel to help the army. Reader support also decreased, as people refused subscriptions in favor of donations for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Despite this, the media outlet survived.
Later, the first blow came, namely the bankruptcy of the Fondy payment system, which caused the editorial office to lose all its subscribers in a day. Monobank came to the rescue, promising better conditions. But in the spring of 2025, it turned out that the bank’s system was not working correctly with regular payments: all monthly subscriptions were automatically converted to one-time ones. This meant the actual zeroing of the support base.
«It knocked me out for a few weeks. Completely. In parallel, there were extremely unpleasant and humiliating showdowns with Mono, which started simply with a lie that everything was working correctly, moved into the phase of «we don’t know when and how it happened, but it’s not our fault» and completely finished at the stage of «we will compensate you 12 thousand hryvnias out of love for the media,» Kobernyk noted.
According to her, the lost funds were eventually compensated, but without taking into account potential losses.
In the comments to the post, Monobank co-founder Oleg Horohovsky responded: «Katerina, I am very sorry that such a mistake occurred. I apologize for this. I am personally donating UAH 100,000. Thank you for what you are doing!»
The topic of paid subscriptions and financial support for Ukrainian media remains critical. In the world, reader revenue models (payment for content directly from readers) are becoming the basis for the survival of independent editorial offices. In Ukraine, such practices are only being formed, and even a technical failure can jeopardize the existence of a publication.
Earlier, dev.ua also published an article about how monobank began developing its own network of terminals. This was reported by the bank’s co-founder Oleg Horohovsky.
