Where's the money, Tin?

The federal television channel Match TV, created in November 2015, has not yet learned how to earn enough to cover its expenses. In two months of last year, the loss amounted to 1.24 billion rubles, and at the end of 2016 this figure increased to 1.74 billion rubles. With all this, the head of Match-TV, Tina Kandelaki, considers the channel successful.

Readers were introduced to the financial indicators of the TV channel according to Russian accounting standards by Sovetsky Sport , which found this data in the SPARK-Interfax database.

Let us remind you that Match-TV is part of the largest Russian media holding Gazprom-Media. The creation of a sports-themed channel in its structure was explained by the media as the passion of Gazprom head Alexei Miller for sports. Since at that time NTV-plus was experiencing serious financial problems, it was decided to create a new sports direction in the holding and abolish the previous one. At the same time, solve the problems of the Rossiya-2 TV channel, which has become too burdensome for VGTRK.

“The decision was made at the highest level and with the participation of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who believed that the country needed a powerful sports media holding. As a result, “Russia 2”, along with three cable channels and the Sportbox website, where you could watch broadcasts on the Internet, was transferred to Gazprom Media in the spring of 2015. They cost Gazprom 9.3 billion rubles - and as a bonus, the company received equipment from the Sports Broadcasting company, which owned all the equipment for Olympic broadcasts. According to representatives of Gazprom Media, the equipment, taking into account depreciation, cost six billion rubles,” writes Meduza journalist Ilya Zhegulev.

In addition to the fact that Match had good starting positions in terms of personnel and technical equipment, the channel received subsidies from the state budget, but still showed losses. In 2016, the treasury allocated 775.8 million rubles to Match-TV. Such data was previously published by Forbes .

Interestingly, at first the channel’s management wasted money, which partly explains the income and expense figures. “At the start, the commentators flew in business class. I don’t remember such gypsyism anywhere. Now the channel is trying to eliminate travel expenses as much as possible, deliberately consciously reducing the quality of the product,” quotes a former top manager of the Medusa channel . The publication also reports that at first the presenters were dressed in GUM, where the prices for dresses were 100 thousand rubles, and to advertise the project they flew to Sochi to film fashion TV shows, staying in expensive hotels.

With all this, the head of Match-TV, Tina Kandelaki, considers the channel successful. At a minimum, in generating interest among a part of the audience that was previously lukewarm towards sports. “Before we came to Match TV, the 18-24 audience was not interested in sports at all. With the arrival of our team and the updating of content, they became interested in e-sports and the English Premier League. This audience is very important to me, 18-24, 25-34. This is the audience that we are growing - our qualitative advantage, which is noted by leading Russian advertisers,” she said in an interview with RNS .