229 Countries in Three Months: Who Reads POTATOES NEWS, and Why We’re Opening Partnerships for 2026–2027

We rarely write about ourselves. But once a year it’s worth showing the numbers — if only so you know where the footage shot in your field ends up, and who watches it.

What follows is how this project became what it is, honest figures from every platform with no rounding in our favour, and an invitation to those in the industry who’d rather appear in these stories as participants than as a line in the credits.

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How It Started

The first articles on potatoes.news are dated 2010. Back then it was an ordinary news feed: press releases, industry statistics, translated wire reports, short notes on regional meetings. Agricultural sites like that number in the dozens, and there was nothing remarkable about ours.

The turning point came in 2025, when we stopped retelling other people’s news and started filming our own.

The idea was simple and, frankly, not obvious: the truth about farming isn’t in a brochure. It’s in the field, in conversation with someone who has grown potatoes for twenty years and knows exactly where the money leaks away. That’s how the International Potato Tour was born — not a series of reports, but a continuous expedition.

Autumn 2025. Chuvashia, the Slava Kartofelyu farm — one of the first episodes in the new format. No script: we arrive, walk into the field, turn on the camera.

December 2025. The potato summit in Delhi. Our first trip beyond the post-Soviet region, including an interview with Agristo’s regional sales director for MENA. It became clear the format worked in more than one language.

2026. The expeditions came one after another. Kyrgyzstan — Issyk-Kul, the Tyup and Ak-Suu districts, the Zarya, Adal Agro Plus and AgroWay Plus cooperatives. Kazakhstan — the Karaganda, Pavlodar and Almaty regions. Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India. Russia, from Primorye to Omsk. Egypt, Brazil, Argentina and Peru entered our coverage and analysis.

Summer 2026. We launched the POTATO 2.0 podcast — long conversations with practitioners instead of short news items. A pilot episode from Kyrgyzstan, then Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and an interview with the President of the World Potato Congress.

Along the way the site grew language versions, and our material began travelling across eight platforms: YouTube, VK Video, Rutube, TikTok, Dzen, Telegram, MAX and Yandex Music for those who listen while driving.

The principle hasn’t changed in all that time, and it fits in four words: real fields, real people.

Now, what that adds up to in numbers.

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The Website: A Genuinely Global Readership

When we looked at search traffic geography for the past three months, readers had arrived from 229 countries. Russia — where the project is based — accounts for just 1.2% of that.

Region	Share
Europe	37.9%
Middle East & North Africa	17.7%
CIS & Caucasus	11.3%
Sub-Saharan Africa	9.9%
Southeast & East Asia	9.6%
South Asia	6.7%
North America	3.3%
Türkiye	1.3%
South & Central America	1.2%
Russia	1.2%

Leading individual countries: Iran, South Africa, India, Uzbekistan, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Tanzania and Egypt.

Over sixteen months, cumulative reach stands at 79,978 clicks from 6.2 million search impressions across 240 countries.

We never set out to become an international publication. It happened because a story about a farm in the Issyk-Kul region or the Karaganda steppe turns out to be the only material available on the subject — and people find it in Nairobi and in Gandhinagar alike.

YouTube: 498 Videos and 6,442 Hours Watched

Over the past twelve months, the @POTATOESNEWS channel recorded:

• 217,875 views from 1,551,167 impressions
• 6,442 hours of actual watch time
• 80,761 unique viewers

The most-watched episode is a report from Kazakhstan’s Pavlodar region, at nearly 20,000 views.

To put 6,442 hours in perspective: that’s 268 days of continuous viewing. That’s how much time the industry has spent watching how colleagues work.

VK: Russia at 82% — and Brazil in Second Place

Monthly performance:

• 12,386 unique viewers
• 64,927 views
• 206,174 impressions

We had assumed this channel was entirely domestic, but the geography says otherwise: Russia accounts for 82%, followed by Brazil, Bangladesh, India, Türkiye and Pakistan.

One more figure worth understanding: 78% of views come from external sources, not from the platform’s own recommendations. The channel lives because people embed the videos and forward them to colleagues — not because an algorithm pushes them.

MAX: A Small Channel Almost Everyone Reads

457 subscribers is a modest number. But every post in the International Potato Tour channel is seen by 266 people on average — 58% of the channel. The range runs from 219 to 358 views, with no dead posts.

This is the project’s most engaged core. People argue about spray programmes in the comments here, and this is where the subjects of future episodes most often come from.

LinkedIn: Where the Decision-Makers Read Us

Our most surprising platform. Over the past year:

• 12,138 followers
• 570,011 impressions
• 88,922 people reached

Eight language pages are running — English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, German, French, Dutch and Hindi. Together they deliver roughly 51,700 impressions a month.

But the composition matters more than the reach. Our followers include people from PepsiCo, McCain Foods, Syngenta, KWS, GRIMME, HZPC, HyFun Foods and the International Potato Center (CIP). Owners, directors, vice presidents and senior executives make up 29% of the audience. Farming accounts for 16%, food production for 11%.

Put plainly: nearly one in three readers of our English-language feed makes decisions about procurement, technology and partnerships.

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What We Produce

The International Potato Tour — location filming on working farms. Over the past year we have worked in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, India and across Russia from Primorye to Omsk. The format never changes: we arrive, film the field and the conversation, with no gloss and no rehearsed lines.

The POTATO 2.0 podcast — long-form conversations with practitioners: agronomists, farm managers, and specialists in machinery, seed production, storage and processing. It publishes to YouTube, VK Video, Rutube, Dzen and Yandex Music — the last one for people who listen behind the wheel and in the field.

The website and translations — every story runs in Russian, with key material published in English and other languages. That is precisely what produced those 229 countries.

Two Events We’re Preparing For

The 13th World Potato Congress — 26–30 October 2026, Naivasha, Kenya. For the first time in the Congress’s thirty-plus year history, it comes to Sub-Saharan Africa. Over 1,000 delegates from 60+ countries, under the theme “Global Potato Partnership for Enhanced Food Systems, Nutrition Security and Trade.” We are assembling a delegation and will be working there all week.

The Global Potato Summit 2026 — 16–17 December 2026, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India. The first edition drew more than 10,000 visitors and 200+ exhibitors from over 20 countries. India is the world’s second-largest potato producer, and Gujarat is its processing hub. For us this is a return: we worked at the Delhi potato summit in December 2025, and that trip is what showed us our footage travels well beyond the CIS.

At both events we film, interview senior figures, and meet the people who will decide what this industry looks like in five years.

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An Invitation to Partner With Us in 2026–2027

The project has outgrown what enthusiasm alone can carry. Filming, travel, editing and translation into eight languages are the work of a team, not a hobby. So we are opening a partnership programme for 2026 and 2027.

One principle up front: we don’t sell ad slots. We offer substantive presence in the content. The difference is straightforward — people scroll past a banner, but they watch a conversation with your agronomist about why roots suffocate in heavy soils all the way through, and then forward it to colleagues.

Available formats

A podcast episode with your expert, recorded in studio. Either you come to us or we come to you. Full studio recording, editing, publication across every platform, plus an audio version for streaming.

A podcast recorded online. For international guests and anyone who can’t travel, we record remotely — at proper quality and with full post-production. The format is already proven: this is how we recorded our conversation with the President of the World Potato Congress.

Filming at your operation. We travel to the farm, the plant, the trial plot. One trip produces one complete package: video across four platforms, an article on the site, and translations.

A dedicated section on the site built around your field, with expert material written by your specialists and edited and translated by us.

Presence on tour. Your material, machinery, products and branding appear in location footage — in the places where they’re discussed on the merits.

Joining our delegations to the World Potato Congress in Kenya and the summit in India, with access to the business programme, field days and site visits.

Who this is for

Producers of seed potatoes, crop protection and fertilisers. Suppliers of machinery and of storage and processing equipment. Companies entering the CIS, Middle Eastern, African, South and Southeast Asian markets — that is, the places where we are already read and competitors are not yet working.

And growers, separately. Becoming the subject of an episode costs nothing. We come out, film the field and the conversation, and publish across four platforms with an article and translations. We’re interested in large enterprises and in farmers working a few hectares alike. What matters is having something to say.

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Get in Touch

Partnership terms, formats and pricing for 2026–2027 are available on request and built around your specific goal. Tell us which markets you work in and what you want to say to the industry, and we’ll propose an approach.

Viktor Kovalev, founder Phone and messaging apps: +7 967 712-02-02 Email: i@viktorkovalev.ru

The International Potato Tour’s general partner is Avgust.

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Website figures cover 13 May – 12 August 2026 (Google Search Console) and the sixteen months from April 2025. YouTube covers August 2025 to August 2026. VK covers May–July 2026. MAX covers 17 July – 12 August 2026. LinkedIn covers August 2025 to August 2026. Metrics from different platforms are not additive: visits, views and impressions measure different things.