Yahoo buys into Arabic search engine Maktoob.com

Missed this one – Yahoo has announced it is to acquire Maktoob.com, the leading online community in the Arab world with more than 16.5 million unique users. This also means that Yahoo will acquire control of the original Arabic search engine – Al Araby.com. in their release, Yahoo gives various statistics justifying the acquisition. What they don’t say is that Yahoo has also been relatively successful in the region – but didn’t have an operational advertising platform in that part of the world.

The Africa-Middle East region is one of the very fastest growing regions for internet use and with 300 million speakers, Arabic is a very important language looking forwards into the future. Google has also been very keen to capture the Arabic world. While Internet usage in the Middle East has grown more than tenfold since 2000, most markets are still in the early stages of adoption. According to the World Bank, there are more than 320 million Arabic speakers worldwide, while less than one per cent of all online content is in Arabic.
Spending on online advertising is expected to grow by 35 – 40 percent this year in the region, according to Madar Research.

Source: Maktoob Business via Multilingual Search

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