Saudi Arabia (KSA) is one of the most connected populations on earth. The Saudi Center for Opinion Polling (i.e. the SCOP) indicates that 99% of Saudis use some sort of social media. By almost any measure of reach, this is a market that has already matured.

But reach isn’t the real question. The real question is simpler: are people actually getting something out of all that time online?

Across the region, the signs say: not quite. Research indicates rising social media fatigue and a growing appetite for content that feels real, rather than performed. Nearly half of the Kingdom is not satisfied with their experience online, with the single biggest cause being that they find social media a “waste of time”.

Saudi residents are spending 3.5 on average per day scrolling through feeds built to hold their attention, not to serve their lives.

Algorithms are excellent at reach. They study what you’ve clicked, watched, and engaged with, curating your feed to keep you online for as long as possible. What they can’t do is understand you in context and give you content that you actually want to see. It’s why a joke lands differently in Jeddah than in Riyadh, or why a recommendation means more coming from your neighbour in Khobar. Timing and place actually matters to a person.

That’s the difference between reach and relevance. Reach asks how many people you can get a hold of, whereas relevance demonstrates whether what you’re showing someone actually fits their life, right now, where they are – how you’re holding on to them.

At Jodel, we found these differences in context existing not just between countries, but between cities too.

Riyadh moves fast, and its users want recommendations that respect that pace. Jeddah has its own humour and texture, and its conversations carry that personality. Khobar sits inside a tightly connected Eastern Province, where recommendations travel between cities as easily as within one.

No algorithm trained on national or global averages captures that kind of difference. Only the people living it can.

This is the shift Saudi Arabia’s digital market is asking for: away from platforms that measure success by how long they hold your attention, and towards ones that measure it by whether they actually helped. A two-minute exchange that answers a real question, where to find good coffee beans in a new city or whether a café is worth the drive, can matter more than twenty minutes of passive scrolling.

That’s what we’ve built at Jodel. Discovery is grounded in place and location, where people find out answers and information from neighbours rather than algorithms. It doesn’t ask users to perform for an audience. It just asks them to be honest with the people nearest to them.

An online population is not the same as a served one. Saudi Arabia (KSA) doesn’t need more reach. It needs platforms willing to be judged by relevance instead: are they helping residents feel a little more connected to the place they actually live in, beyond the screen?

By Alessio Avellan Borgmeyer, Founder, Jodel.

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