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Nabd, the MENA’s leading aggregator of personalized news for mobile users, has taken the Turkish market by storm over the weekend.

Introduced as Nabiz and localized in Turkish for the local market, the app has achieved top ranking on the iOS and Android stores.

When the News Are the News

Launched in 2013 from Kuwait, Nabd caters to users’ interests by collecting the news and information that matter to them from over 1,500 Arabic news sources, including TV channels, websites, sports clubs, technology hubs, blogs, and more.

The news aggregator is available across the MENA. It was first launched by the Kuwaiti mobile app development company Waveline Media in 2013. In just 3 years, Waveline Media says the app has totaled over 10 million downloads. Nabd managed to gain popularity for its convenience as a single, accessible source of news, including breaking news updates.

Through a partnership with Celtra, theapp also features a native advertising platform that integrates ad content into its feed and also targets users base don the relevance of their interests. This marks the logical evolution of the company’s earlier ad platform, Yabila, which featured only discounts, promotions, and deals for the Kuwaiti market.

This has established Nabd as the leading regional newsreader – not a small feat, considering that this now puts it next to FlipBoard, the hugely popular global leader.

The Power of Localization

For now, Nabiz aggregates news from around 300 Turkish sources.

Nabd co-founder and CEO, Abdur-Rahman El-Sayed, told VentureBeat: “Despite the language difference, Turkey is very close to the Arab world with similar news consumption habits, and it enjoys over 30 million smartphones users.”

In an increasingly saturated space, MENA appreneurs are adopting localization as a strategy to generate profit – and eventually go global. Localization increases an app’s chances of discovery and improves its ranking on app stores.

ArabNet Business Intelligence’s report, “Top App Trends Dominating MENA 2015” revealed that users in the region download more international apps due to the lack of Arabic apps or their poor quality. Content platforms like Nabd and Nabiz, or the Arab World's leading online encyclopedia Mawdoo3.com, are among the apps setting out to change this.