The eighth annual Asda’a Burson-Marsteller Arab Youth Survey reveals a generation in transition, not least when it comes to their media consumption habits. Sunil John, the agency’s founder and chief executive, offers his insight and analysis into this year’s findings
The aim of this annual survey is to present evidence-based insights into the attitudes of Arab youth, providing public and private sector organisations with data and analysis to inform their decision-making and policy formation.
As in previous years, that evidence points to a highly tech-savvy youth, completely at home in the digital world, and one that is tuned in to the political and economic situation in the Middle East. It also reveals a generation in transition, torn between the early promises of the Arab Spring, and its legacy of instability and economic uncertainty.
Changing habits
Our key findings this year reveal that, for the first time, more young Arabs get their daily news online than from TV or print media, and newspaper and magazine readership among young people in the region is in a precipitous decline.
When asked about their daily news consumption, 32 per cent of young Arabs say they get their daily news online, while 29 per cent say they watch TV news and just 7 per cent read newspapers daily (down from 13 per cent in 2015).
However, it is not all bad news for what we can term ‘legacy’ media, or at least television. In spite of the growing use of online media, television remains king of total media consumption with 63 per cent of young Arabs saying they still watch TV as part of their overall news consumption, up from 60 per cent the previous year. The overall use of online news sources has grown from 40 per cent to 45 per cent, with social media up from 25 per cent to 32 per cent.
Publishers may still be clinging on to print as a key revenue driver, but young consumers aren’t so nostalgic. Today, just 17 per cent of Arab youth get any news from newspapers, down from 62 per cent in 2011. Magazines fare even worse, with just 6 per cent getting their news from magazines, down from 8 per cent in 2015. It is yet another wake up call for a regional media industry that needs a radical overhaul if it wants to maintain relevance and revenue.
Social media, as expected, continues to make inroads into young Arabs’ media usage. WhatsApp, the instant messaging service owned by Facebook, is the most popular social media platform. Two in three young Arabs (62 per cent) use it on a daily basis, followed by Facebook (55 per cent), YouTube (33 per cent), Twitter (28 per cent) and Instagram (28 per cent).
One interesting trend is the increasing use of social media as a news platform. More than half of young Arabs (52 per cent) use Facebook to share interesting news articles they read, up from 41 per cent last year. As Facebook moves to attract news publishers into its space, more and more news is going to published, read and disseminated without consumers ever needing to go outside of the Facebook ecosystem. That model will no doubt be copied by other platforms. The internet, once seen as a near infinite space, is shrinking into a small number of ‘walled gardens’.
Stability over democracy
But social media usage by young Arabs partially ties in with another key finding in a surprising, and perhaps unsettling way. When it first emerged in 2011, and peaked in 2012, the Arab Spring was hailed as the first revolution to be played out on social media. Twitter and Facebook were the platforms of choice for organisers pushing to get the overwhelmingly young protestors on the streets.
The surge of hope for real social change in those heady days has given way, just five years later, to a more practical realism in the minds of the region’s young people. Five years after fighting for political freedom during the Arab Spring, youth across the region are calling for stability rather than democracy. Optimism that the region would be better off in the wake of the Arab Spring has been steadily declining over the last five years: in 2016, just 36 per cent of young Arabs feel that the Arab world is better off following the uprisings, down from 72 per cent in 2012.
Today, the majority of young Arabs (53 per cent) agree that promoting stability in the region is more important than promoting democracy (28 per cent). Still, I believe that the impact of social media on the Arab Spring, and beyond, can be seen as largely positive developments – giving a voice to a once marginalised demographic.
However, the rise of online platforms has helped create a far more sinister phenomenon: Daesh. Much is made in the regional – and especially international –press about Daesh’s sophisticated media machine, making wide use of social media and other digital platforms to bombard impressionable youth with sophisticated propaganda. Just this month, a report in Arab News quoted experts saying that Daesh and its supporters put out 250,000 Tweets per day.
Daesh rejected
Their message, thankfully, is increasingly falling on deaf ears. While three in four (77 per cent) Arab youth are concerned about the rise of Daesh, just one in six (15 per cent) believe the terrorist group will ultimately succeed and establish an Islamic state in the Arab world. Three-quarters are convinced the group will ultimately fail to achieve its ultimate goal of establishing an Islamic state.
In fact, contrary to Daesh’s narrative, concern about the rise of the group is increasing, with youth citing it as the biggest obstacle facing the region for the second year running. In 2016, 50 per cent of youth in the 16 countries polled believe it is the biggest issue in the region, up from 37 per cent last year.
Tacit support for the militant group is declining, with nearly four in five (78 per cent) rejecting the group outright even if it were to change its tactics – this year, just 13 per cent of young Arabs agree they could see themselves supporting Daesh if it did not use so much violence, compared with 19 per cent last year.
Seeking opportunity in the UAE
Young people remain concerned about opportunities in the region. Indeed, a quarter (24 per cent) of Arab youth believe that lack of jobs and opportunities for young people is one of the primary reasons why some are attracted to Daesh.
Given the political and economic realities facing Arab youth today, it is understandable that optimism around opportunity is in short supply. One country that has consistently bucked the regional trend, though, is the UAE, cited as a beacon of hope by many young Arabs, and a place where opportunity is in abundance.
Arab youth see the UAE as a safe and secure country with a thriving economy and as such is the country most would like to live in, and their own country to be like. When asked to think about the country they would most like to live in, nearly one in four (22 per cent) of young Arabs cite the UAE and just as many say it is the country they would most like their own to emulate (23 per cent). On both questions, the UAE is followed by the US, with 15 per cent saying they would like to live there and 19 per cent saying they want their country to be more like it.
This year, for the first time, the survey also asked potential entrepreneurs – young Arabs who said they intend to start their business in the next five years – in which Arab country they would like to set up their business. The UAE ranked as the most preferred country with one in four (24 per cent) citing it as the top business destination in the Arab world, followed by Saudi Arabia (18 per cent), and Qatar (13 per cent).
There are 200 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa, and it is my belief that they can be viewed as either a threat, or a dividend. In our industry, they can only be a dividend. It is their values, their media consumption habits, and even their employment expectations that we need to adapt to, not the other way around. The only threat they pose is to the old ways of doing business – and that’s not really a threat to anything at all.
Sunil John is chief executive at Asda’a Burson-Marsteller