Building a media company in the Gulf was never the safe option for Richard Fitzgerald.
When he launched Lovin Dubai in 2015, there was no established playbook for creating a digital first, independent media business that could build a large audience and turn that attention into a sustainable commercial operation.
There was an idea, a small team and a belief that Dubai’s audience was ready for something different.
The journey from that beginning to Augustus Media, Lovin and Smashi was the subject of Fitzgerald’s fireside conversation at Tech Innovation Forum 2026, where the Founder and CEO of Augustus Media spoke with Wissam Younane, CEO of BNC Media Group.
It was a conversation about media, but more importantly, it was a conversation about persistence.
Starting With Almost Nothing
The Lovin Dubai story is now familiar across the region, but its early circumstances are worth remembering.
When the platform went live in September 2015, Fitzgerald and his team did not have the scale associated with Augustus Media today. There were no millions of followers, no extensive regional network and no established media reputation.
According to Fitzgerald’s own account of those early days, Lovin Dubai launched with one full time employee, no page views, no followers and little fanfare. Even the person originally hired as an editor withdrew shortly before launch because of a non compete issue.
It was hardly the conventional starting point for a media company.
Yet that was precisely where the opportunity existed.
Fitzgerald had spent years working in advertising and media before arriving in Dubai, including experience in Ireland, England and the UAE. He had seen how audiences were changing and how social platforms were altering the relationship between publishers and consumers.
The opportunity was not simply to create another publication.
It was to build a media brand around the way people were already consuming information.
Learning What Dubai Wanted to Read
The success of Lovin Dubai was not built around publishing more content for the sake of publishing more content.
It was about understanding the city.
Local stories, people, restaurants, events, personalities, businesses and the everyday experiences of living in Dubai became part of the editorial mix.
The result was a publication that felt closer to the rhythm of the city than a traditional newspaper.
That relationship with the audience became the foundation of the business.
Within seven years, Augustus Media reported that Lovin had expanded into 15 cities and grown to more than six million followers, while the company had built teams and studios across the region.
But growth did not come without risk.
The company encountered legal disputes, threats and difficult commercial periods. Fitzgerald has previously described the early years as a period when the business was not certain to survive.
Those experiences matter because they provide context for what Augustus Media eventually became.
The polished media operation came later.
First came persistence.
The Decision to Build Something Bigger
Lovin Dubai could have remained the entire business.
Instead, Fitzgerald began asking a more ambitious question.
Could the company build a broader media ecosystem around the audience and capabilities it had developed?
That question eventually led to the creation of Augustus Media and the development of new brands and formats.
Smashi became one of the most important examples.
Rather than simply replicating Lovin’s model, Smashi was created as a media brand focused on business, technology, sport and other specialist areas, with video and streaming at its core. Fitzgerald’s own account of the company’s development describes the decision to build a streaming service from scratch and move into areas that traditional publishers were not necessarily designed to serve.
That was another calculated risk.
Building a streaming platform requires considerably more than publishing articles on a website. It means investing in production, presenters, studios, technology, distribution and new commercial relationships.
But it also reflected a broader understanding of where media was going.
Audiences were moving between websites, social platforms, podcasts, video channels, connected television and streaming services.
A media company that wanted to remain relevant could not afford to think about itself as only a website.
Smashi and the Expansion of the Media Model
Smashi demonstrated how Fitzgerald’s approach evolved from a local digital publication into a broader content business.
The platform developed programming around business, technology and sport, while Augustus continued to experiment with formats and distribution.
The company later expanded its streaming ambitions further, including partnerships that have taken Lovin and Smashi content onto connected television platforms. In 2026, Augustus announced that Lovin Dubai would launch a FAST television channel on Samsung and LG, extending a digital first brand into the television environment.
Smashi has also expanded its sports proposition. In August 2026, Augustus announced a partnership with the UAE Football Association involving Smashi Sports and OTT streaming for the 2026 and 2027 season.
The significance is not simply that the company moved into television.
It is that a media company born from social and digital publishing continued to reinvent its distribution model rather than waiting for the market to dictate its future.
Taking the Risk of Remaining Independent
Perhaps the more interesting part of Fitzgerald’s story is the decision to build Augustus Media as an independent company.
Independent media is difficult anywhere.
It is particularly challenging in a market where large established organisations, global platforms and major advertisers compete for attention.
Fitzgerald has spoken publicly about wanting to build an independent media institution in the Arab world and proving that such a company could become a serious commercial business.
That ambition has required a different kind of discipline.
Instead of depending primarily on investment to create the appearance of scale, Augustus has increasingly built its business around advertising, content production, audience relationships and commercial partnerships.
The company’s latest published results illustrate how far that model has developed. Augustus reported $16.2 million in revenue for 2025, a 31.9 percent increase from the previous year, with $3.49 million in net profit. The company reported 17 million network followers and 140 employees across eight regional offices.
Those numbers provide an important measure of the transformation.
What started as one digital publication in Dubai has become a regional media company.
Persistence as a Competitive Advantage
There is a tendency to describe successful media companies through their viral stories, follower counts and headline partnerships.
Fitzgerald’s journey suggests another ingredient matters just as much.
Persistence.
Lovin Dubai survived periods when the business model was uncertain. Augustus continued to invest in content and people during difficult market conditions. The company expanded into new cities, developed new brands and continued experimenting with formats.
During the pandemic, when advertising markets came under severe pressure, Fitzgerald has described the decision to maintain the company’s editorial operation rather than dismantle it. His argument was straightforward: if the audience relationship survived, the commercial opportunity could return.
That philosophy has become central to the company.
Building From the Gulf Rather Than Looking In From Outside
There is also something significant about where the story was built.
Augustus Media was not a global media company that arrived in the Gulf with a ready made international model.
It was built in Dubai.
Lovin was developed around individual cities and their communities. Smashi was developed around regional interests. The company has continued expanding across markets including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Qatar and other parts of the region while maintaining its roots in the UAE.
That gives Fitzgerald’s story a relevance beyond the company itself.
It demonstrates that a media business can be created in the Gulf, understand the culture and behaviour of its audiences, build commercial scale and then expand outward.
A Media Company That Keeps Moving
The conversation between Fitzgerald and Younane therefore went beyond the success of Lovin Dubai.
It was really about what happens when an entrepreneur refuses to stop at the first successful idea.
Lovin created the audience.
Augustus created the company around that audience.
Smashi expanded the editorial and commercial proposition.
New platforms, cities, partnerships and formats followed.
Today, Augustus describes itself as an independent media company with a growing network of brands and formats across the region. Its 2025 results show that the business has reached a scale that would have been difficult to imagine when Lovin Dubai launched with one employee and virtually no audience.
For T&I News, Fitzgerald’s appearance at Tech Innovation Forum 2026 offered a particularly relevant story for anyone attempting to build media in the region.
The lesson is not simply that digital media can work.
It is that building a successful media company requires the willingness to take risks before the market validates the idea, the patience to survive the difficult years and the discipline to keep reinventing the business once the first idea succeeds.
Richard Fitzgerald did not simply build a media brand around Dubai.
He built a company that demonstrated that independent media could be conceived, financed, developed and scaled from the Gulf.
And perhaps the most important part of the story is that the experiment is still evolving.
