Muxlim

» see muxlim.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

muxlim was built for muslims living as a minority somewhere in the west. i grew up in turkey, where being muslim is closer to the water you swim in than an identity you go online to find other people around. so the premise of the site pointed away from me from the very start. i was the wrong kind of muslim for it, in a manner of speaking, the majority kind who never had to look for the community because it was already everywhere.

it was founded in 2006 in helsinki by mohamed el-fatatry, who had moved to finland a couple of years earlier, together with pietari päivänen. a muslim lifestyle social network, out of finland, which is a strange and quiet place for such a thing to come from until you think about it. a small muslim population in a nordic country, scattered and online, looking for each other. that is exactly the crowd a site like this is for. at its height it claimed users across around 190 countries and called itself the most popular muslim lifestyle site anywhere.

the money never worked, which is how most of these end. i only read about muxlim much later, going through lists of dead social networks. from ankara it always looked like a careful answer to a question i had never once needed to ask.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

the pitch was a clean, halal-friendly corner of the web where a muslim in stockholm or minneapolis could be online without wading through everything the mainstream sites threw at them. lifestyle first, not politics, not religion in the heavy sense. music and video and blogs and the ordinary texture of being young and muslim in a place where you were outnumbered. it won awards and drew attention, and for a while it looked like it might be the thing that stuck.

~ the unraveling ~

attention is not revenue. when the network did not grow the way the investors needed, the company turned toward selling itself as a gateway, a way for global brands to reach the muslim consumer market through muxlim's audience. that is a reasonable business on paper and a hard sell in practice, and it moved the company away from being a place people wanted to hang out and toward being a marketing channel. the audience could feel the difference.

~ how it actually ended ~

the numbers were brutal. by its own reports the company lost over 800,000 euros in 2010, better than a million dollars, on a site that was never going to earn it back at the rate it was going. it had taken some public money from tekes, the finnish state innovation agency, and that ran its course too. in february 2012 muxlim shut down the social network and the advisory work with it. the founder went quiet and said he would explain more in a book.

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