Turkey's social media platform Yazbee aims for 30M users by 2020

A local social media platform developed by Turkish entrepreneurs and engineers, Yazbee, is ready for prime time.

Arif Ünver, the founding chairman of the application, stated that the company has the potential to employ 500 people and become a global brand. They aim to reach 30 million users next year.

Ünver noted that Yazbee uses 100 percent locally developed software and can be downloaded on available application stores.

"When we look at the number of users of the popular social media, Turkey ranks in the top 10 in all. It is even in the top three on some platforms by population," he said.

Social media-loving Turks spend an average of four hours on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, research revealed in February.

The new social media platform allows users to follow individuals or topics, Ünver said.

"We have identified 24 sections of interest such as news, magazines, sports, politics, career, technology and humor that cover all segments of society," he added.

"Users can see the posts by following topics according to their interests without following the individuals. Topics are very important to reach the target audience," the founder of Yazbee explained.

According to the statistics provided by Ünver, there are 50 million social media users in Turkey. "Thirty-seven million of them are over the age of 13," he said.

"We are not only targeting Turkey. We aim to reach the Balkans, Middle East and Caucasus in the local region. The number of social media users in the region is 283 million. We aim to reach 200 million people." Ünver argued that Yazbee could be Turkey's first billion-dollar company.

"We aim to have a market value of $1 billion by the end of 2020. In 2022-23, with the users in the region, we target a market value of $10 billion," he said.

Mobifin A.Ş., the creator of Yazbee, will invest in the application as the company increases revenues. "We are aiming to increase the number of our employees as we invest more," Ünver said. The social media platform does not only serve in Turkish language, but it also has options in English.

The server infrastructure of Yazbee is derived from Turkish GSM operator Turkcell's Gebze data center. "We are also one of the rare applications that have a very little number of bot accounts because our infrastructure was designed in a way not to accommodate bots," he said.

Ünver also emphasized that all the data is preserved in Turkey, which ensures data sovereignty.