AME Info audit points to surge in Internet use

Regional e-commerce websites have been slow to take off in the Middle East, but that has not stopped people shifting to the Internet as a source of news and business information.

This is part of a worldwide trend, with newspaper owners increasingly worried by falling circulations as their readers move online and abandon printed media.

Indeed, the trend now is for publishers like Rupert Murdoch to buy websites, on the principal that if you can't beat them, buy them. His complaint is that newspapers are losing their classified advertising to the Net, a revenue stream he calls 'rivers of gold'.

In the largely un-audited world of Middle East newspapers the same trend is evident, with publishers starting to sense a loss of advertising in the absence of hard circulation figures. Certainly the spectacular growth in readership at leading regional business news and information website AME Info suggests a powerful move online.

Online readership rockets

The second audit from ABC ELECTRONIC at AME Info showed a 175% surge in readership to an average of 29,000 unique users a day. Moreover, the actual monthly total of unique users in October was 651,193, unlike a traditional newspaper which might have the same 29,000 or whatever number of readers per day, everyday.

Thus the advertising reach of a website like AME Info is considerably higher than a typical local newspaper and to a targeted business audience only.

Newspapers also flatter their own readership figures by taking their daily circulation and multiplying this by a figure for the average number of readers per copy - a multiple usually established by their own research. Magazines also do the same thing when converting their circulation statistics into estimated readership bases.

It is therefore all the more remarkable that audited Internet readership statistics from a website like AME Info can stand up to comparison with local newspapers whose largely un-audited figures are subject to such interpretation.

Reader habits changing

Clearly the way people get their news and business information in the Middle East is changing, and the advantage is very much to the advertising client at present because this huge move in audience is not yet reflected in the rates paid by advertisers or sponsors to websites. This anomaly is bound to close as the reality of reader behaviour is gradually revealed by independent research.

But until the media industry discovers that the worldwide trend towards accessing news and business information online is happening in the Middle East too, probably because Internet publishing is so much faster than the printed media - then the Internet remains the biggest bargain for advertisers in the region today.