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Xi, who works in Saudi Arabia, helped her buddy get the phone number of a strange girl on the street.
"It was a romantic-sounding story but not romantic at all," said Xiao Xi, who was driving with some Saudi friends when one of the guys in the car saw a girl in the car next to him at a traffic light and was so amazed by her looks that he fell in love at first sight.
However, due to the conservative culture in the Middle East, strange men and women cannot talk to each other freely, so he had to ask Xiao Xi to find a reason to get to know her.
They followed the girl's car and finally met at another traffic light intersection. He waved to the girl, and as the car window rolled down, she was so beautiful that he described himself as almost being "bent". Through the car window, Xiao Xi said she was new to Saudi Arabia and wanted to meet local same-sex friends, so she asked for her phone number. Then the light went green and the two cars disappeared into the night ......
Later, through that phone number, Xiao Xi's friend managed to catch up with the girl and made a vow to each other.
Despite the happy ending, the story of that night showed Xiao Xi once again the misalignment between the realities of the Middle East environment and social needs.
She lamented, "If I hadn't been there that day, would they have just missed out? Middle Easterners are too difficult."
MENA (Middle East and North Africa) refers to the 24 countries and regions in West Asia and North Africa, 22 of which are Muslim countries. Xiao Xie is the Middle East Regional Manager of an overseas social product, and BASE has been in the region for more than three years.
Most unmarried men and women in the Middle East have no access to the opposite sex, and it is not allowed by the secular culture to talk to strangers of the opposite sex. There are also very few entertainment venues in the region, and offline social entertainment options are scarce.
You may find it hard to imagine that in Saudi Arabia, which is so economically developed, there was no cinema for nearly 40 years, and only in 2018 did the country's first cinema reopen.
Under the extremely repressive environment, human needs are raging. Internet entrepreneurs in the MENA Region Entertainment Social Niche Niche see this huge demand gap, and the rich treasure underneath it.
The Middle East, with a population of 490 million and an Internet penetration rate of over 60%, also has the world's top spending power. In recent years, the per capita GDP of the six Gulf countries has remained in the tens of thousands of dollars, including Qatar's per capita GDP was once as high as $70,000, while the local per capita daily working hours is only 3 hours, "rich and free", is the "gold mine" of social entertainment products. The city is a "gold mine" for social entertainment products.
Various social and entertainment APPs are gradually appearing in local people's cell phones, becoming a channel for them to pass their boredom, relieve loneliness and release their hormones.
MICO Search Index
Middle East Love Story
One day in March, messages kept popping up on Arafat's phone and his friends said they saw him on MICO's homepage and asked him if he was going to be "hot".
The night before, Arafat had been constantly "gifting" in one of MICO's rooms, and after sending 2,000 gold coins, he managed to raise the Saudi Arabian flag in the live room. He was very proud of himself and felt that he had demonstrated the "glory" of his country. His account was also featured on MICO's home page banner, making himself known and noticed by more people, killing two birds with one stone.
MICO is a social app for strangers. Recently, this product has been held in 18 countries in the Middle East "send gifts, raise the national flag" campaign by many local people, like Arafat successfully "raise the flag" in the live room of nearly 10,000 users.
According to the data, MICO has entered the top 10 of App Store social apps in 71 countries and regions, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries.
Since Middle Eastern countries have similar cultures and languages, users in the Middle East are often not limited to making friends and having fun on MICO. The "Raise the National Flag" campaign has been a great success for many "Middle Easterners" who have not only met new friends, but also experienced a different sense of national pride.
Today, opening MICO to make friends and have fun has become a daily routine for "Arafat". The social app includes features such as random matching, multiplayer chat, family friendships, and game rooms, while encouraging users to interact with each other through live streaming. Users can connect with "viewers" at any time, and "viewers" can communicate with each other.
MICO
Arafat says that the social atmosphere here is very different from the real world they live in, free and colorful, breaking all the time and space constraints, and meeting all kinds of interesting people. Of course, it also includes the women who make his heart flutter.
This kind of product can both make friends and "kill time", is the local people's immediate need.
Now, the average daily usage time of MICO Middle East users can reach 3 to 4 hours.
Due to the conservative religious culture in the Middle East, entertainment is very limited, smoking hookah is one of the few activities. It is even more difficult for men and women to make friends, as Saudi malls, restaurants and other public places are divided into men's, women's and family areas, and most people only come into contact with their own family members before they get married.
Family-arranged matchmaking is how the majority of people meet their partners, and if they feel right, the two get married; there are few avenues for free love.
Today, the Internet provides a rare ground.
According to World Bank data, as of the end of 2019, Internet coverage reached 99.7% in Qatar, 99.2% in the UAE, 95.7% in Saudi Arabia, and slightly lower but 74% in Turkey. Social media usage is much higher in the UAE than in Europe and the US, with an average of 10 social accounts per person. All in all, Internet coverage in the Middle East is surprisingly high.
These social entertainment products are popular among locals, and stories of Middle Eastern men and women getting married through online social platforms are a daily occurrence.
Last February, MICO held its Valentine's Day Competition, where nearly 100 online chat rooms drew many singles to connect. Liza, a Moroccan girl, and Hassan, an Egyptian guy, successfully met at the event and have been in love for a year and are now planning their marriage.
However, not everyone is as lucky as Liza and Hassan, and relationships that start online often meet with resistance in reality.
Egyptian girl Judy and Iraqi boy Shadi met as friends through MICO, and as their relationship heated up, they developed a mutual affection for each other and became a couple. However, due to various reasons such as foreign countries and online dating, the relationship was strongly opposed by the girl's family.
MICO learned about this matter and helped them think of various ways together. On the advice of MICO's Middle East operations staff Rania, Shadi asked the manager of his company to issue a certificate and guarantee for him, and MICO, the largest local foreign-funded Internet company in Egypt, also issued a statement of circumstances for the two users. Together with repeated persuasion from multiple friends around, Shadi's family was reassured to accept Shadi, and the two are now married and have children in Egypt.
Not only does online love extend offline, but the offline social culture seems to be being influenced by online as well.
It can be seen that as online social entertainment products become more popular, the offline social environment in some Middle Eastern countries is becoming more open and the strict system is gradually loosening.
Today, in some of the more open countries, such as Egypt and Morocco, men and women can go to school together, commute to work together, and chat on the road. In Saudi Arabia, the most conservative country, traditional rules such as "male and female divisions" are also being broken. Older
More "Middle East love stories" are continuing to happen in the Chinese app, and at the same time, they are tearing open a rift in the real world and giving new life to this ancient land.
Some people are spilling money, some are getting rich, some are living their dreams
Late at night, at eleven o'clock, Mohammad, who had no sleep, opened Yalla. because he recently wanted to buy another car, he created a room and invited his good friends to chat and seek advice on car buying. A "car guy" came into the room and offered Mohammed a few brands and high-performance models to solve his problems.
Yalla is also a social app from China that focuses on voice socialization, and its basic model is similar to Clubhouse, which became a global sensation earlier this year.
However, this product appeared much earlier than Clubhouse.
After a few years of polishing, it has incorporated rich Middle Eastern elements and the interaction design fully caters to the social habits of Middle Easterners, and is welcomed by many local users, with a monthly activity of 16.413 million.
TikTok
Abbas is a TikTok creator from Saudi Arabia who was chosen by the local broadcaster to be the face of its Ramadan Project. To date she has posted 30 videos for the program on TikTok, gaining over 1.2 million followers and becoming a popular face on TikTok during Ramadan in the Middle East.
Sure?
Abbas says her dream is to become an actress, and now she is getting closer to that dream.
Sarah from the UAE is also changing her life through TikTok. An unknown person in the real world, she is an internet celebrity with nearly 7 million followers in the online world. Through various parody challenges, each of Sara's videos has over 120,000 likes and 2,000 comments.
TikTok continues to hold the highest ranking in the app store download charts in select countries in the Middle East, becoming an essential form of entertainment for local youth and even an avenue of employment for many.
In the Global Gender Gap Report 2021, MENA remains the region with the largest gender gap, with only 31% of women employed, and 142.4 years left to close the gender gap. In a world where men's power is overwhelmingly dominant, restrictions on women are so severe that in many countries women are required to wear black robes, cover their faces, and are not allowed to work outside the home.
As a result, short video creators and anchors have become a career choice for many women in the region, and have given them more dominance in their lives.
Some people buy houses and cars by making short videos, while others earn start-up capital for their businesses through live streaming.
Emila's family was once penniless and struggled to make ends meet. Two years ago, she began to live in MICO, and soon harvested a group of loyal fans, as a full-time anchor. Today, the "95-year-old" Amyra has bought a house and a car, improving the economic situation of the whole family.
There are nearly 20,000 full-time MICO anchors in the Middle East, just like Emila. A successful anchor can earn an average of $4,000 per month, which is a medium to high income level in the Middle East. One anchorwoman once suffered from cancer, but all companies rejected her job application, and it was MICO that finally offered her an olive branch so she could earn her medical expenses.
The money-rich users are often called "big spenders" by the platform. These "big spenders" have a habit of sleeping during the day and spending at night. Some of them spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on gifts for their hosts.
In the Middle East, the big spenders are not necessarily celebrities, netizens or beautiful women.
In MICO, the proportion of vegetarians on the air is not small, and the proportion of male anchors is higher than in China.
The Middle East is a very typical human society, and gender relations are only one kind of social relations on the platform. Under the culture of "reciprocity", the tycoons will also reward each other, you and I will support each other.
There are also some anchors who, by virtue of their ability to deal with people in the world, are able to get around in various "clans" (a kind of social unit on the platform), gaining a lot of popularity and a lot of money.
Last month, a Turkish male anchor earned $85,000 (about RMB 550,000) on MICO, which is 21 times more than the average local anchor.
Stable employment gives local young people enough income and allows them to slowly realize their dreams.
Hardy, for example, was a popular anchor for both MICO and Bigo Live. Last year, he used the money he saved as an anchor to open a cab company in Turkey and become a businessman.
Hadi and his cab company, Bigo Live, is a live entertainment product of Huanju Group abroad, and according to Sensor Tower data, Bigo Live ranks seventh in the global top entertainment apps list in 2020 in terms of revenue.
Now the world's webmasters and cross-border e-commerce practitioners are in the Southeast Asian market and Europe, the American market in the fierce competition, may wish to develop niche markets, or will allow to increase your performance, such as Amazon opened a cross-border e-commerce platform in the MENA