Hear from the all-female dream team behind The Modern East, a new media platform. The team sits upstairs at The Greenhouse – "Oh Rapunzel, let your hair down!"
The Modern East is an online platform for millennials in the Middle East region. While we could call ourselves a publisher or a magazine, what we aim to create with The Modern East is much more than that.
With all the endless talent in the Middle East, we felt like there was a lack of platforms showcasing all this homegrown talent. Not only so, but even less were doing so in Arabic. Enter The Modern East! We want to speak to millennials in their own language – both literally and figuratively – and we do this in a couple of different ways.
Firstly, working with a network of around 50 freelance creators of all types across the region, we curate content for our audience created by people just like them – our wider Modern East Crew. In short, we allow our community to tell their own stories.
We cover topics of Beauty, Fashion, Travel, Entertainment, Food and Lifestyle, through a lens that is always socially and culturally relevant. Our content is created to speak directly to the Millennial Middle Eastern audience, reflect what’s happening in the local community, and always told with a Modern East twist.
In parallel to working with our freelancers, the content we produce is also heavily based on SEO and social listening. Adopting a data-first approach, the content we produce is always exactly what our audience is talking about, interested in and wants to consume. In other words, we are always bringing forth the most relevant and current topics for millennials in the region.
In what can be considered a saturated market for publishers, The Modern East takes a unique position enabling it to reach its target audience unobstructed. With a heavy focus on Instagram and a mobile-first user experience in mind, our entire vision Is built with millennials in mind. This spans everything from our strong visual identity to how we talk directly to our audience, always keeping them engaged.
While The Modern East has only just launched this year on January 15th, the platform has already surpassed all projected results for this timeframe. As of mid-March, we had hit a milestone of 1.6M page views and over 450K unique users. While from an engagement perspective, The Modern East boasts the highest average time spent in the market with over 3 minutes and the lowest bounce rate at 3.9%.”
We’ve had great opportunities to partner with brands within Chalhoub Group and outside of the group to create great content that resonates. We were able to bring this collaboration model and expertise in millennial and Gen Z audience habits to our partners’ content strategies.
While so far our main focus has been our articles, another prominent facet of our content is set to be video. We have recently launched our video platform, and already have 4 different video series in production!
We strive to constantly be listening to our audience and create our content in the way that best suites them. Thus, considering that our main market is Saudi Arabia, the UAE and the rest of the GCC countries respectively, everything we create or publish is available in both English and Arabic. So while our project is still new, the Modern East is growing very fast! Every day we connect with new talent around the region, growing the conversation, and building a community with our audience.
Check out www.moderneast.com today and follow us @themoderneast. If you'd like to collaborate or know more about our new venture please contact us at May.Zeineldin@mailmac.net and Danielle.assadourian@mailmac.net