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One year after its debut, Blinx – the Dubai-based digital startup that produces news and short form storytelling targeting Gen Z and Millennials across the Middle East and North Africa – is boasting big numbers.
In the past 12 months, the pioneering content hub — which was launched from a high-tech Dubai Media City studio in September 2023 by prominent Arab journalist Nakhlé Elhage, who previously ran the Al Arabiya news network for 16 years — has scored 5 billion views. Blinx now has 6.5 million followers, almost evenly split between Instagram and TikTok, and has generated some 125,000 social media posts, according to the company.
Numbers aside, it’s clear that Blinx – whose chief investor is Tareq Ahmed Al Masaood, the head of regional auto sales giant Al Masaood Group – is emerging as a major force within the media landscape of the MENA region where, according to the World Bank, two-thirds of the population is under the age of 35.
Below, Elhage speaks to Variety about how Blinx managed to gain traction and his plan to take it to the next level.
Simply put, what makes Blinx stand out?
Blinx is a storytelling hub. It is not a network. It’s not a broadcaster. It’s not a newspaper. It’s not a platform. And we don’t care on what platform we publish our stories, as long as we can make good stories. Blinx’s target audience are young people under 35, young Millennials and Gen Zers, who are the majority of the population in this part of the world.
What is your business model and what are the next steps?
We get funded by brand activation, we have some monetization on advertorial and product placement and the usual things. Now it’s time to attract more money. I cannot say that we’ve done double digits when it comes to [making] million dollars this year. We hope that’s going to happen soon. And from now on, we will focus on the gamification of storytelling.
How does your content get produced?
When we started this project, we had in mind that this was going to be story-centric. All the technical solutions and workflows that worked for broadcasters and newspapers and traditional platforms, they don’t necessarily work well with us. Everybody here at Blinx, including the security guard, can pitch a story. And then when we filter the pitches, we decide to transform them into story. Each story we decide on, we convert it into different sentences. Every sentence is a different format for a specific platform. This is how we operate.
To do this, we needed to build a machine. We recruited people from universities, we got a lot of interns and we keep getting interns. We train them heavily and we throw them on the field and they start doing our stories. The main thing we teach our young storytellers is: what is in it for me? We tell them to put themselves in the shoes of the viewer and say, “Why am I telling you this story?” After that, we apply the KPI [key performance indicators], which are update, inform, put in perspective, inspire, entertain and connect.
What are some of the top stories on Blinx? What kind of content are you generating?
There are two things [at play] here. One is the topic, and then there is how we tell the story. When it comes to the topic, it’s definitely no longer the political topic [that dominates interest]. Maybe there is fatigue of the political. Though the Gaza War is still happening, probably there is fatigue. What we noticed is that the topics that are appealing to people are those that affect their daily life. For example, we did a story about Shein [the Chinese online fashion retailer] and it scored around 16 million views on one platform and around 10 million views on another one. Gossip stories also score a lot of views, as do some human-interest stories, and also technology stories.
Tell me more about the Shein story.
The story was about the quality and the health standards that they are following. People are really, really interested in this type of story. Health is very important. Food is very important for people. Wellness is very important for people.
In reporting a story like that, how does your staff operate?
We produce around 50 stories every day — stories with a storyteller on camera or voiceover. Probably 30% of these are based on purely original reporting from A to Z. And the rest are mixed. We get some material either from open sources or from agencies, and we rework them with some added value such as graphics, research and other things.
As an old-school journalist, do you feel a weight on your shoulders to provide ‘solid’ news?
What we are doing here at Blinx is mixing the best of both traditional media and digital media. Traditional media is credible and it’s professional, but it became boring and not appealing to the young generation. Digital media is exciting and fresh and playful, but it’s also not well-researched all the time, and not credible and trustworthy. Traditional media, unfortunately, over the years has become affiliated with some political agendas. Social media is, somehow, quite messy when it comes to political agendas.
What we’ve done is get the best out of both traditional media and digital media in order to offer information in good storytelling form — well-researched information that is delivered in an entertaining and inspiring way and an engaging way. This is our value proposition and this is what I believe we’ve succeeded to achieve over the past 12 months.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
English (US) ·