How long before the Internet overtakes local newspapers?

The biggest spenders in the regional online advertising world are the likes of Emirates Airline and Nokia. Yet with less than one per cent of total advertising going to the Internet, the Middle East has a long way to go to catch up with more advanced markets.

A UK study by GroupM, the WPP holding company which accounts for 30 per cent of global media buying, predicts that 13.3 per cent of British national advertising this year will be online compared with 13.2 per cent for newspapers.

Behind this shift in advertising spending is a remarkable generational shift in the way people read news. Instead of turning to a daily newspaper, many readers, and particularly the younger, high-spending readers, are going online.

Net news advantage

The Internet has several advantages over newspapers. First, publication is instant, so that stories are often broken on the Net and not published until the next day in the papers. Secondly, the Internet has a fantastic search capability, through the search engines like Google, making news stories more visible.

For the Middle East, AME Info consistently delivers the highest Google search rankings of any website, and this is one reason why AME Info has an audited readership of 752,000, a multiple of many times the nearest newspaper circulation. Try a simple Google search for 'editorial column' and you will find this column top out of millions of entries.

Is it any wonder that advertisers and sponsors have started to follow this migration of eyeballs from one media to another? However, in the Middle East the process of allocating advertising dollars has not kept up with the movement of readers.

Perhaps it is just a matter of time. What makes sense for advertisers in the UK will also be true for the Middle East, where Arabic language Internet channels are the fastest growing media today. Why is Net advertising so low in this region, while in the UK it is about to overtake newspaper advertising?

Changing habits

Partly this is down to inertia on the part of advertisers. But the brightest companies are already there on the regional Internet, and harvesting the huge reach of this media to advantage. You can not after all click on a newspaper advertisement for more details!

However, the true reason is probably just simple credibility. In the Middle East marketers have yet to have the courage to believe the evidence right in front of their eyes when they look at the Internet on their desk. This is where people are getting their information, and this is where the future of advertising lies.

For the billions being invested in Internet infrastructure by the regional telecommunications companies is building the media of the future which is already much stronger today than most appreciate.