YallaFeed And Twitter Launch First Live Show in MENA

YallaFeed and Twitter announced today the launch of the first live show in the Middle East & North Africa region, “#HawanahZein”, on the platform. The biweekly evening show will focus on what’s happening in the Arab world on Twitter during the month of Ramadan. The first episode will be streamed on May 17.

#HawanahZein will be produced by YallaFeed with support from Hollywood-based production company, Propagate. The show will cover a wide range of real time news and social commentary from across the region including latest celebrity news and TV shows, trending topics across news, sports and entertainment. It will be hosted by two content creators, Abdullah and Nour Ali Saad Fakhr (Aboud and Noor), who are also identical twins.

Unilever’s Lipton, Omo and Knorr brands have signed on as sponsors. These sponsorships will allow tailored audiences who connect to Twitter to access and view the live episodes while they’re scrolling through their timelines.

The show will curate what’s happening on Twitter based on live conversations that spike on the platform, in a form of live video to appeal to a modern, young Arab audience. From live Tweets to polls that engage directly with the audience, the segments will highlight unpredictable, funny and insightful topics during the holy month. The format is based on Propagate’s show, #WhatsHappening which debuted on Twitter last October.

“Twitter is one of our most important news sources and its focus on the live, public conversation has helped our content team tackle deep insights. Now, the platform is fully adopted as part of our daily brainstorming and editorial meetings,” said Bahaa Moussalli, Co-founder & CMO of STEP Group. “We’re really excited about this show because we’re taking a decades-old TV format and re-interpreting it into today’s social news entertainment. It will enable us to engage with our audience while delivering high quality live programming during Ramadan,” he continued.

“STEP Group’s brands; YallaFeed and StepFeed, are among the first publishers in the region that we’ve partnered with for Twitter’s In Stream Sponsorships; a program pairing advertisers and publishers. We have now extended this partnership to bring the first live show on Twitter to the region,” said Kinda Ibrahim, Director Media Partnerships, MENA, Twitter. “As millennials are consuming more live content, such a show will connect with a hard to reach audience that relies on social timelines to discover and consume content.”

The live stream will be free and accessible globally to logged-in and logged-out users on Twitter and connected devices. You can find the stream, which will air every Monday and Thursday from 12am-12.20am KSA, via @YallaFeed.

Recent research conducted by Hall & Partners revealed that 47% and 46% of users in UAE and Saudi Arabia respectively are interested in watching a live-streamed, exclusive show on Twitter in Ramadan.  

Tens of millions of people have tuned in to YallaFeed’s live video productions. With 50 million monthly views, YallaFeed’s productions; that include Arabic shows like Dohk Al Mamnou3, Al Tahaddi (Challenge), reach 120 million viewers.

Original live programs and productions have debuted in the US on Twitter, including AM to DM by BuzzFeed News (@AM2DM), which reimagines the traditional morning show format for the way young people consume news today, and Bloomberg Media’s 24/7 global social news network @TicToc.