The Ministry of Culture spent UAH 60 million on English-language media, which almost no one reads

Four months ago, the Ukrainian government launched the English-language website The Gaze to inform foreigners about events in Ukraine. During this time, the work of the media has already cost the Ministry, and more precisely, taxpayers, UAH 60 million, and these costs will only increase in the future.
 
An investigation on this published NGL.media. A few details about yet another inefficient use of funds by officials:
 

The Gaze releases seven programs with inexplicable frequency. Among them are the puppet show “Hidden Angle”, the socio-political program “Talk For More”, the cooking show “Chefs Next Door” and the comedy show “European Edge”. The most expensive cooking show costs UAH 261,000 per episode, each of which collects an average of 900 views on YouTube.
 

The media site has about 65,000 visits in 4 months of operation. For comparison, the English-language version of “Ukrinform”, which is also financed from the state budget, collected almost 9 million visits during the same period, and the private The Kyiv Independent – more than 18 million visits.
 

Also, NGL.media found out that the cost of creating one short news item for the site is UAH 4,000, and an article is UAH 8,500, which is quite a high cost for the Ukrainian market.
 

The new state media costs taxpayers about UAH 12 million every month. The necessity and effectiveness of such expenses, especially in the conditions of a full-scale war, is extremely doubtful.