(MENAFN- Muscat Daily) Muscat- Arabic news portals in the Arab world are increasingly relying on digital marketing channels due to the rise in the number of people preferring to use these channels for their daily news consumption.
Social media is the most ubiquitous platform for these portals, where Twitter is used by around 88 per cent, Facebook by almost 80 per cent and YouTube by 63 per cent, revealed the Digital Media Index report for the first quarter of 2017.
According to the report, which followed 672 news portals in 18 Arab countries, sports news is the most popular type of content on Arabic portals at 62 per cent. It is followed by regional news at 59 per cent and economic content at 50 per cent, whereas technology content is at 28 per cent and education at 13 per cent.
In Oman, the most covered topic is regional news at 78.57 per cent, while news related to sports and economics is around 64 per cent. Digital media is changing rapidly in the GCC and the Arab world with Arabic news portals taking the lead in adopting new tools like mobile apps, social media and real-time marketing to make it more discoverable and consumable by their target audiences. GCC countries, with exception of Oman, have the highest average of news portals per person.
Bahrain has almost 13 news portals per million population, Kuwait has 12, Qatar nine, the UAE eight, Saudi Arabia seven, whereas Oman has only three. Elsewhere in the middle east, Lebanon has around six portals per million and Palestine has five. Major social media platforms that continue to make impact in the GCC region are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
In Oman, most portals have presence on Twitter (94 per cent), while 88 per cent have presence on Facebook, 71.43 per cent on Instagram and 57.4 per cent on YouTube. Portals' representation on social media platforms like Twitter is lead by Morocco, Algeria, and Qatar with 100 per cent presence, while for Facebook Moroccan and Algerian portals again have 100 per cent representation, followed by Qatar (95 per cent), Syria (93 per cent ), Iraq (92 per cent), Palestine (92 per cent), the UAE (91 per cent) among others.
The index shows that Internet penetration in the MENA surpasses the global average which stands at 50 per cent. It is at 70 per cent in the Gulf (99 per cent in the UAE, 94 per cent Bahrain, 93 per cent Qatar, Kuwait 82 per cent , Oman 74 per cent and 70 per cent in Saudi Arabia), while it is 76 per cent in Lebanon, and 73 per cent in Jordan among others.
Among the Omani population, 2mn use Facebook averaging 57 per cent of the Internet users. In the UAE, 9.2mn people use Facebook averaging 100 per cent of Internet users, Qatar also has 100 per cent of its Internet users using Facebook while in Kuwait 90 per cent of its Internet users use Facebook, in Bahrain 83 per cent use Facebook and in Saudi Arabia 84 per cent are on Facebook.
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