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The team of the largest Belarusian media about IT dev.by launches an editorial office and a website in Ukraine on the dev.ua domain. The publication will be headed by former Liga.Tech editor Stas Yurasov. Adsider shares the details

Who are they

dev.by is a media about IT in Belarus and the world, operating since 2008. The publication publishes expert information on IT, collects a catalog of Belarusian IT companies and reviews about them, maintains a calendar of IT events and salary statistics, places vacancies.

Every month more than 1.2 million unique users visit dev.by, among them are developers, analysts, testers, managers and executives of IT companies. dev.by is published by Belarusian businessman Artem Kintsevy. He moved to Kyiv last year.

One of the reasons for entering the Ukrainian market is the team’s desire to grow. “The population of Belarus is 9.4 million people, 4.5 times less than in Ukraine. Our IT media project has reached a certain ceiling. To continue to grow, you need to enter neighboring markets,” — is noted in a on the website of “the most ambitious Ukrainian media about technology.”

Not the last role in the decision to launch the project in Ukraine was played by sociopolitical processes in Belarus, which intensified after August 2020.

How to prepare for entering the Ukrainian market

Belarusian dev.by receives about 60 thousand unique views from Ukraine every month — about 5% of the site’s audience. This inspired the project team to deepen its work in the Ukrainian market. In the fall of 2020, two Belarusian journalists went to Kyiv to write about local IT companies and research the market. Then the team decided to gather a separate team of Ukrainian journalists. “The Ukrainian media market is more lively, mobile, developed,” the company says.

The team also highlighted the main problems that local media complain about:

1. There is a lack of professional authors and editors.
2. TV and IT companies are stealing digital journalists.
3. 5 years ago salaries were higher.
4. Everyone is tired of paid articles.
5. Everyone wants to make videos and say you can make money from it. But few do anything worthwhile.

According to Denis Klevitsky, editor-in-chief of dev.by, there are many large quality media in Ukraine, while in Belarus there is only one specialized IT project. This means that the struggle for the audience’s attention will be tougher.

Team

Stas Yurasov, who previously worked for ProIT, Capital and liga.tech, and was also the author of the Mytholoma show on Ukraine 24 TV channel, became the editor-in-chief of dev.ua.

“My project was a secondary product of a large holding company, which, ‘of course, it is important and necessary,’ but still secondary. In the case of dev.by, I have a partner interested in my topic. And it matters,” Stas says.

In addition to Yurasov, the team includes about ten people, including Oleksiy Dziuba, Masha Brovinska and art director Dasha Svetlova. She previously worked at Banda and Babel.