Regional websites, huge untapped marketing potential

The greatest untapped marketing opportunity in the Middle East today is its regional websites. For the top three Internet sites have secured more eyeballs than the newspapers and many television channels.

Yahoo, the leading general access portal, last week published a full page advertisement in local media explaining its own regional success. More people in the UAE look at Yahoo! than both of the local newspapers combined. In Saudi Arabia more people view Yahoo! than read the No1 newspaper.

Moreover, these figures are audited. They are not a publisher's best guess. And how much audited data does anyone in the regional marketing market really have?

What is the true circulation of the many new magazines launched in the UAE over the past two years? Nobody knows, and yet advertisers spend a fortune on adverts that nobody will ever see.

In the Internet business space AME Info has built up a commanding lead with 1.3 million users accessing the website last month reading 12.3 million pages. More than 100,000 subscribe to the weekly AME Info newsletter, and over 10,000 have registered as MyAMEInfo.com users.

For Arabic language Internet users Maktoob.com has taken the pole position. Again its audience figures just knock the conventional media into the shade.

The overall verdict is clear. The Internet market leaders are the best untapped marketing option in the region. Yet 41% of advertising expenditure is presently on print media and just 0.23% on the Internet.

Surely it is time that the marketeers of the region re-thought their strategy around the true position with regard to the public's reading habits. The public has moved to embrace the Internet, it would seem logical for marketing departments to do the same thing.

Entrenched attitudes, powerful commercial interests and of course the traditional media themselves, are all conspiring to obscure the success of the Internet. But at the end of the day market forces will triumph, and those that jump on this bandwagon will find that they are on to a winner.

The public love the Internet in Middle East. Its cheap, its accessible, its independent, and offers instant access to news that used to take days to reach some markets, if it ever did. This is a media that will continue to grow, as the technology is only in its infancy in many countries. If this is the Internet today, watch out for tomorrow!