Operating a niche media in affilite marketing and media buying comes with a unique set of constraints: the audience is inherently skeptical of ads, monetization relies almost entirely on the very industry being covered, and the space is tight-knit enough that everyone knows each other. We sat down with the founder of UAGEEK.MEDIA to talk about how the project evolved from a Telegram forum seeded with 200 dummy bots into a full-scale platform, what sets their approach apart, and how they balance sponsored content, partner reviews, and job listings without losing editorial integrity.
How It All Started
Tell us how the idea to launch UAGEEK.MEDIA came about — what led up to it, and who was behind it from the start?
UAGEEK wasn't originally planned as a media outlet at all. The first idea came up about a month after the start of the full-scale invasion. I'd left the russian arbitrage chats and, after a while, realized I was just missing professional conversation — nowhere to properly ask a question, discuss something, or ask for advice.
I wanted to build a Ukrainian community, but not just one big chat where you can't find the message you need ten minutes later. Telegram's forum feature launched at exactly the right time.
On November 6, 2022, I created the chat and started setting everything up, and by November 11 it was already live for people. Funny detail: at the time, you needed 200 members to activate a forum, so I had to pad it out with 200 bots first. I deleted them right after activation. So technically, UAGEEK first "members" weren't entirely real.
The website came later. Once the community had grown to around two thousand people, it became clear that Telegram worked well for conversation, but information got lost there fast. I wanted a separate place for articles, news, affiliate programs, services, and other useful information. That's how UAGEEK.MEDIA launched on April 17, 2023.
What were you doing before launching UAGEEK? What's your background?
My journey in traffic started around 2016, and almost all of my early experience was tied to free traffic.
For about a year, I started out driving free traffic to CS-related sites. Then I moved into dating: working with traffic from Snapchat, testing different sites and automation methods to get free traffic at bigger volumes.
TikTok was its own story. I started testing it as a traffic source back when affiliate programs were still very skeptical about it. I remember them shutting down offers or just refusing to let us send traffic from TikTok, because the assumption was that it was mostly kids on there and there was no real audience for dating. About six months later, TikTok was already being actively discussed in arbitrage chats, and hundreds of people were driving traffic from it.
That's probably when the approach I still like formed: look for traffic in places where, at first glance, there doesn't seem to be any — or where nobody else sees the point in testing it yet.
So my background before UAGEEK is mostly free traffic, automation, and constantly hunting for new traffic sources. I always preferred not working off a ready-made formula, but finding a way to get traffic somewhere that doesn't look obvious at first.
How much money and effort did it take to launch?
I didn't need much money at the start. It took a lot more time.
There were no investors, no big team, no separate launch budget. I learned to do most things myself, gradually: setting up Telegram, figuring out the website and WordPress, thinking through the structure, content, SEO, advertising. Friends and people from the community helped out with some things.
Even the logo was pretty simple. My wife sketched the first version that actually worked on a regular napkin, and a designer later polished the identity professionally.
So at the start, time was really my main investment. I just built the project and watched to see if anyone would actually need it.
How is UAGEEK.MEDIA's approach different from other media in the affiliate niche?
Probably the main difference is that the community came first, and the media came after.
Because of that, we can see who's reading us, what questions people are asking, what they're discussing right now, and what information they're missing. That shapes the content too.
For example, at some point a lot of people from the free-traffic world started joining the community. We noticed that part of the audience didn't need dense, ten-page case studies — they needed normal, basic explanations: how something works, what a certain term means, which tool is for what. That's how our "Beginner's Base" came about, where we collect basic explanations of affiliate marketing, arbitrage, traffic sources, and tools.
At the same time, there's an experienced audience that's interested in case studies, interviews, news, and changes on ad platforms and the market as a whole. So we try not to write for just one group.
It also matters to me that UAGEEK stays alive. Affiliate is a fairly informal industry, so media covering it doesn't have to sound like a corporate press release.
What was hardest at the start — building an audience, earning advertisers' trust, or something else?
Probably the hardest part was the very beginning, when you're putting in a lot of time but still don't know if anyone will care.
We actually got lucky with the audience. The community hit its first thousand members in about three months, with no paid promotion. People recommended UAGEEK to their friends, and other Ukrainian channels and industry people supported us. That's when it became clear there really was demand for a platform like this.
With advertisers, it was gradual. When a project is new, it's normal for companies to take a wait-and-see approach at first. Over time, the first partnerships came, then repeat placements, then recommendations — and that's how trust builds up.
How many people currently work on the UAGEEK brand?
If we're talking about the core, permanent team — it's a handful of people. There's someone on copy, someone on design, someone on the technical side, and separately there are moderators and people who help with specific areas.
I still personally handle a big chunk of UAGEEK development myself — everything from ideas and products to the site and various technical things.
So we don't have a big editorial team in the classic sense. It's a small team, and the lineup shifts a bit depending on what we're working on at the moment.
What's stayed the same from your original vision for the media, and what had to change?
The core idea has stayed the same: it's a Ukrainian project, and we don't work with russian companies or the russian market. That was true at the start, and it's still true now.
But the project itself became a lot bigger than I originally planned. Geek started out simply as a place where people could ask questions and talk to each other. Then articles, news, job listings, catalogs of affiliate programs and services, interviews, events, CryptoGeek, and other formats came along.
So the original need was very simple — build a convenient Ukrainian community. Everything else grew up around it gradually.
Monetization Without Losing Independence
You've got advertising, affiliate program reviews, job listings, and a "From Our Partners" section all at once — how do you balance multiple revenue streams with editorial honesty?
For me, it's about not mixing advertising with editorial opinion.
A company can pay for an ad placement, a sponsored piece, or another commercial format. That's a normal media business model. But payment doesn't mean we automatically recommend that product ourselves, or that we can't be critical of it down the road.
We also try to clearly separate editorial and sponsored content, so the reader understands exactly what they're looking at.
Of course, we can get things wrong too. There's no way to know in advance what will happen to any given company or product a year from now. So for me, it matters more not to try to look infallible, but to react properly when something changes.
What criteria do you use to decide who to recommend to your audience, and who not to?
We look at the company's reputation, its history, its terms, and what people say about it. If we have doubts, we can go ask people in the community who've actually worked with them.
But I'd separate advertising and recommendation here. They're different things.
If a company buys an ad placement and we don't see a reason to turn down the partnership — that's advertising. But when we tell the reader ourselves that we can recommend a certain service or affiliate program, we're a lot more careful, because we're putting our own reputation behind that recommendation.
Have there been cases where you published an affiliate program or service that later turned out to be dishonest — and how did you react?
Over several years of work, all sorts of things have happened: companies shut down, changed teams or terms, some ran into payment problems.
The fact that a company was solid two years ago doesn't guarantee it'll stay that way forever. So we try to keep information updated. If an affiliate program has shut down, that gets marked on the site. If a serious, confirmed problem comes up, the old recommendation needs to be revisited too.
On the site, for example, reviews of some affiliate programs that have already closed are still up, but with an appropriate label. It's also part of the market's history, so I don't see the point in just deleting everything after the fact.
Over three-plus years of work, have there been cases where a brand's PR communications were handled by someone with a genuinely low level of professionalism — and what did that look like in practice?
Sure, that's happened.
For me, low-quality PR isn't really about some individual mistake. People can make mistakes — that's normal. The problem is more about not understanding how media actually works.
For example, we might get sent a finished text that doesn't fit our audience at all, with the expectation that we'll just publish it as-is. Or they'll call a piece "exclusive" when the exact same text was sent to several other outlets at the same time.
It also happens that a brand first offers up their representative for an interview, and then, after getting the questions, asks us to cut anything that goes beyond a comfortable, polished company pitch.
That said, there are also really good PR specialists who actually understand the media's audience, work well with editing, and help find a topic that's interesting not just for the brand, but for the reader too. Working with people like that is really easy.
Have you ever had to turn down an advertiser because their offer conflicted with being honest with your audience?
Yes, we have.
The most obvious criterion for us is working with the russian market. Before any partnership, we always ask the company's representative directly whether they work with russia, russian teams, or russian products. If we don't like the answer, we simply don't take the ad, regardless of budget.
There have been other reasons too: a product with a shaky reputation, problems with the terms, or an advertiser essentially wanting to buy a positive review from the editorial team rather than just a placement. We're also very cautious with new affiliate programs or services. We turn down most of them for advertising, because we can't be sure what — or who — is actually behind them.
I don't think there's anything heroic about it. Any media outlet should have its own criteria for who it's willing to work with and who it isn't. These are ours.
What does "independent media" mean to you in a niche where almost everyone monetizes one way or another through affiliate programs, products, and services?
For me, independence doesn't mean no advertising. Media needs to pay for the team's work, the site, the content, the design, and everything else — so it has to earn money.
The question is what the advertiser's money actually gets to influence.
If a partner can buy a specific ad placement, but can't dictate what we write about the market overall, what questions we ask in an interview, or what we say about some problem — that's a normal model for me.
So independence, for me, is really about being able to keep your own editorial position even while working with advertisers.
Growing the Media
How has the media's focus shifted over time — what did you drop, and what did you add?
At first, we were almost entirely focused on traffic arbitrage. But over time, the range of topics grew, because people's actual work in this niche has long since stopped being limited to just arbitrage.
That's Meta, Google, TikTok, SEO, Telegram, AI, analytics, automation, crypto, and a lot of adjacent areas.
So right now we loosely describe UAGEEK as covering three directions: Affiliate, Digital, and Crypto. At the same time, we don't want to turn the site into a media outlet about literally everything. If a topic has a direct connection to what our audience actually does, then it's relevant to us.
We know you recently did a redesign — what pushed you to do it, and did anything change besides the visuals — your approach to content, the site structure, anything else?
I pretty much built the first site myself in 2023, figuring out how all of it worked as I went.
Over time, the amount of material, categories, and different sections grew a lot, and the old structure no longer really matched what UAGEEK had become. So we decided to rebuild the site.
It wasn't just the design that changed. We reworked the navigation, categories, catalogs of affiliate programs and services, job listings, interviews, news, CryptoGeek. Alongside that, we put a lot of work into SEO, site speed, the English-language version, and the Beginner's Base.
The main goal was pretty simple: make it easier to find the information you need on the site, and make sure it could handle the amount of content already on there.
How did the audience and community react to the update — what kind of feedback did you get?
Overall, the reaction was positive. People mostly pointed out the visuals and how much easier it got to find your way around the site.
At the same time, I was curious to see negative feedback too, so we even left a poll about the redesign on the homepage with different answer options, not just "I like it."
Right now, we're looking not just at what people tell us directly, but also at analytics: which pages get opened, where people click through to, what they search for. That helps us understand what's genuinely gotten better since the redesign, and what still needs work.
In your view, what's the biggest obstacle to the growth of Ukrainian media in this niche?
First of all, the size of the market itself. The Ukrainian affiliate audience is pretty narrow, so it's harder for a niche media outlet to scale using only the Ukrainian market.
There's also the question of how brands are used to working with media. Sometimes platforms get evaluated mostly by follower count or views on a single post, even though other things matter for media too: search traffic, the website, audience quality, trust, how long a piece keeps getting views.
On top of that, Telegram has really spoiled the niche. You can create a channel in ten minutes, so there's this sense that media is just a feed of posts. As a result, dozens of junk Telegram channels have popped up that don't provide any value to their audience, but for some reason still look appealing to advertisers. Who exactly are you looking for there? A publisher who joined a channel to laugh at the cringe content the admin posts isn't going to react to your ad. They don't care.
I also want to say something directly to people who still buy advertising on russian Telegram channels and media, or arrange barter deals with them.
You're essentially spending money into a void. That kind of advertising doesn't help grow the Ukrainian industry and doesn't build trust in your brand with a Ukrainian audience.
For example, recently the organizers of a forum taking place in Kyiv ran a giveaway for a ticket to that forum on a russian media outlet — specifically, on its Telegram channel with about 30,000 subscribers. The post got around 1,300 views and not a single comment. So a simple question comes up: if it's a well-known outlet with a large following, but a post about a Ukrainian event got essentially zero reaction, what was the point of that placement in the first place?
If you're organizing an event in Ukraine and want to attract Ukrainian specialists, it makes more sense to work with Ukrainian media, channels, and communities. That way the money stays inside the market, and the ad reaches an audience that could actually be interested in your product or event.
Media needs to keep the site, editing, design, SEO, analytics, distribution, and community all running. And in a small niche, finding the balance between all of that and a working business model isn't easy.
Do you see a path for Ukrainian projects to grow to the level of global niche media — and what would that take?
Yes, I think that's entirely realistic.
I just wouldn't frame it as us necessarily needing to copy or "catch up to" someone. Local media has its own advantage — it knows its own audience and local market far better.
But if we're talking about an international level, you need consistently good content, your own case studies and research, strong interviews, English-language content, and real distribution outside of Telegram.
We're testing this gradually too: growing the English-language version of UAGEEK and looking at what formats might be interesting beyond just the Ukrainian audience.
Trust and Community
You run several active Telegram communities — what keeps the audience actually engaged, not just reading, and how much do you invest in advertising or growth pushes to grow them?
We haven't bought advertising to directly promote our Telegram channels, so we don't really have a separate budget for paid growth.
The audience grew through content, interviews, recommendations from other people and projects, small contests, and joint activities.
For a community, what matters more to me than the member count is whether there's actual conversation happening. If people are asking questions, answering each other, discussing work problems — then it's doing its job.
So we never set ourselves the goal of just growing the follower count as fast as possible.
Which GeekSpeak guest do you remember most, and why?
Probably the one I remember most is the very first interview — with Alina Chernetskaya.
At the time, she was moderating the Traffic Devils team chat, helping out with communication and members there. For some reason I thought a conversation with her could be interesting, so I offered her an interview — and that's basically how GeekSpeak started.
Alina now runs two communities of her own and has grown a lot professionally since then. So it's interesting for me to look back at that interview as a kind of time marker too: who we all were back then, and where we ended up now.
Actually, I've thought that after all these years, it'd be interesting to do a second GeekSpeak with Alina and find out what's changed since then. I think that'd be interesting for everyone.
In your opinion, what's the Ukrainian affiliate community missing most?
Probably more openness specifically about practical things.
We have a lot of strong specialists, but a big chunk of the good experience stays inside teams or private chats. And publicly, people are usually a lot more willing to talk about successful results than about what didn't work.
I'd like to see more real case studies with actual numbers, technical breakdowns, mistakes, discussions between people with different levels of experience.
Nobody has to reveal their exact funnels or business. Even an honest account of what you tested and why it didn't work is sometimes more useful than yet another post about a successful launch.
What advice would you give people coming into this niche from other fields?
I wouldn't start by looking for a ready-made "funnel." It's better to first understand the mechanics: who an advertiser actually is, how an affiliate program works, where payout comes from, what ROI, conversion, attribution, and traffic sources mean.
I personally started out with free traffic in dating. You don't need a big budget there, and you can learn the basic principles hands-on. For paid traffic today, if it's an option, I'd recommend getting your first experience inside a team.
It's also worth talking to people a lot. A ton of information in this field gets passed person to person. There's nothing wrong with asking a simple question and admitting you don't know something.
And I definitely wouldn't use other people's income screenshots as a measure of how easy it is to make money here.
In Closing
How do you see the role of media in our niche a year or two from now?
I think the role of media will gradually shift from simply producing content to curating and verifying it.
There's a ton of AI-generated text now. You can already churn out dozens of news pieces, rewrites, and articles in no time. But that doesn't necessarily make things easier for the reader.
So it'll matter for media to figure out what's actually worth attention, verify information, add context, find the original source, and talk to people who actually understand the topic.
I think readers will start coming not just for one more piece of text, but for properly curated information that saves them from spending hours searching on their own.
What would you want to change about the niche if you could?
I'd add a bit more healthy skepticism and a bit less showing off success. In our niche, it's really easy to get the impression that everyone around you is making millions, flying business class, opening up teams, and just happening to forget to mention the five projects that shut down before that.
I'd like it to become normal in this niche to talk openly not just about wins, but about failures too. Like what NEGRO said, for instance: "We completely fucked up the offline academy and lost a million dollars on it. Here's what we got wrong, here's what we learned from it, and here's how we approach risk now."
Because someone's testing a funnel with a hundred dollars, and someone else is launching a project with a million-dollar budget. The scale is different, but the logic is the same: you test a hypothesis, you take a risk, sometimes you're wrong and you lose money. And that doesn't make you less successful — as long as you're able to honestly break down the failure and pass that experience on to others.
I don't think the industry gets weaker from that. If anything, it grows up.
What personally keeps you motivated to keep building UAGEEK.MEDIA, despite the challenges of the niche?
The simplest answer is that I'm still genuinely interested in doing this.
Sometimes it helps to just remember how it all started. In 2022, there was an empty Telegram forum that I set up myself. Then the first people showed up, the first thousand members, the site, articles, advertisers, new projects.
It's especially nice when someone writes that they found a job, a contact they needed, a partner, or an answer to their question through us. Those are really simple things, but they're exactly what shows that the project is actually useful to someone.
And I'm also just curious what UAGEEK turns into next. A lot of what exists now, I never planned for at the start at all.
What are UAGEEK.MEDIA's plans for the coming year?
Right now we want to work not just on content, but on products built around it.
One direction is our bot and Mini App: personalized news, community interaction, ratings, activities, and other mechanics. Separately, we're continuing to grow CryptoGeek, the English-language version, SEO, and a base of evergreen material that stays useful for more than just a day after publishing.
I don't want to list ten big plans right now and promise we'll definitely deliver on all of them. There are a lot of ideas, and we'll test them gradually and see what the audience actually needs.
What would you wish for Digital Hustlers readers?
Probably, don't stop learning and asking questions.
Affiliate changes really fast. Platforms update, old approaches stop working, new tools and AI show up. So it's hard to learn something once and work exactly the same way for years.
I'd advise relying less on other people's screenshots and spending more time understanding how things actually work, testing your own ideas, and talking to people in the market.
And I just wish everyone good results in whatever they're working on.
Conclusion
This interview with the founder of UAGEEK.MEDIA offers an authentic, behind-the-scenes look at building a Ukrainian affiliate media brand from the ground up—from early Telegram groups to a robust portal complete with a "Beginner’s Hub," service directories, and an English edition. The founder’s roots in organic traffic and non-traditional user acquisition shaped the platform’s core ethos: uncovering value where others look past it and anchoring content in the real needs of the community rather than corporate press releases.
The overarching message of the conversation is a call for industry maturity: to stop falling for flashy revenue screenshots, to choose advertising partners more deliberately, and to speak openly about failures. UAGEEK trajectory proves that building a respected, independent project doesn’t require deep pockets or a bloated editorial team—just a sharp line between advertising and editorial opinion, accountability for recommendations, and a genuine passion for the craft.
