I wrote last week that to start a news website in the former USSR, you needed to have good (and powerful) friends beforehand. Otherwise, you’d be crushed before reaching profitability.

Well, that’s not true. I met in Chisinau with Dumitru Ciorici, one of the founders of Unimedia.md. Along with 3 founding partners and a handful of employees, he started the first independent, online-only news venture in Moldova.

A year after launch, Unimedia is the #2 most visited news website on the market.

The site boasts 3,500 daily visitors. That’s only a 0.5% reach in this country of 700,000 internet users (to compare, timesonline.co.uk reaches 1.4% of British web users). On the other hand, each user visits 6 pages a day. In other words, Unimedia drives real, sticky traffic, rather than Google-induced visitors.

$6,000 to change the country

Dumitru and his partnerVasile were, at first, website developers who came up with the idea for a news website in their spare time. $6,000 were needed to start the business.

Success came quickly. They were, after all, the first 2.0 website on the Moldovan market. Reporting online in real time and allowing comments, for instance, were novelties as late as 2007. Unimedia journalists are the only one covering parliament live, as debates happen. Such “live reporting” has proven highly popular with Moldovan checking news from their office computers.

The $6000 are now paid back, but Unimedia has a hard time making ends meet. The website was integrated into a holding called New Media Group (NMG), together with an ad agency and a women-oriented portal, both of which were linked to the Unimedia team before.

(Dumitru didn’t say the other 2 projects were more profitable than Unimedia, but I’m assuming it was the reason behind merging the 3 ventures.)

Despite all these efforts, all employees work “12 to 20 hours a day”. That’s a lot, especially if you take into account that they’re still students! The 4 shareholders of NMG didn’t have a salary until the summer of 2008, Dumitru said, as he toyed with his $400-worth iPhone (showing-off is a fixture of the Moldovan business life, he added )

Moral values as a competitive advantage

Unimedia says its strength comes from the unique blend of talents it brought together. From the developer to the manager to the journalist, all the skills they need are under one roof (but for digital design). The networks they open give Unimedia the keys to contact almost any Moldovan professional.

Above all, Unimedia’s success comes from its uncompromising stance. Its parent company’s ad agency, for instance, uses honesty in reporting as a driver for advantage. Similarly, Unimedia refused buyout offers from political parties. As a result, the site is read by decision-makers in Chisinau, especially politicians, says Dumitru.

Their commitment to editorial independence and to building a better media landscape in Moldova becomes visible in their side project, 2009.md. They want to pressurize political parties into getting rid of their Soviet-era politicians with this “virtual parliament”, where users nominate the people they deem worthy to become MPs. So far, 200 Moldovans have been nominated – half of them aren’t members of any political party. Users will vote for the best 101 for about 10 days.

Talent and moral values give Unimedia an unrivaled position on the Moldovan market for online news. In March, a political party allegedly tried to pull the rug from under Unimedia’s servers by financing Pressa.md (now defunct) with resources far superior to anything Dumitru could dream of. They failed in 3 months.

A pay-for blogging platform

The Unimedia brand is already so strong that public figures pay to have their blog hosted on the site. Most of Moldova’s politically aware web users go to Unimedia.md, so that the quality of the audience brought to bloggers is monetizable in itself.

Similarly to the 6€/month formula Le Monde offers in France to have a Le Monde-branded blog, Unimedia explores freemium models with even more emphasis on quality.

Only 4 such blogs operate today, but requests are coming in, Dumitru says. Unimedia doesn’t accept anyone, though. Many politicians want to hop on board, but their requests are generally rejected, lest they use their blog as a propaganda platform. The happy few bloggers are just required to publish twice a week. Apart from that, they’re free to write what they want.

Where are the VCs?

There are more than 4 million Moldovans, 1 million of which live abroad. That’s twice the population of Slovenia, and just a bit less than Slovakia. Surely an international media group should consider investing in the future online leader of such a promising market. Especially at such a small cost.

Dumitru says he’s been looking for investors, but he lacks time to effectively pitch his project to VCs.

Anyone with a spare €10,000?