Hello Arab.net (Part 1)
If you say that I was surprised by the reaction to my last post , then this is not to say anything.
It is nice that, as many have noticed, the article is chaotic, chaotic, full of spelling mistakes and is interested in its topic.
I am pleased to think that I can be useful to my compatriots, no matter where they are. It’s even more pleasant to realize that someone will be able to conquer a new market for themselves, it’s also nice to think that even those who do not succeed, they will still gain personal, invaluable experience, which
The list of questions asked me is impressive. I will not be able to write everything in one topic, and it is unlikely that this is necessary, having estimated (in draft) it was divided into 6 main parts. Let's start.
Heavyweights
maktoob.com
If a Russian-speaking user has a choice in Russian-speaking search engines, or giants' portals such as yandex, mail.ru, rambler and then in descending order, then the Arab user has no choice, he has only maktoob.com , maktub is our everything! Maktub is a mail, galleries, news, games, acquaintances, blogs ... in total 30 services. This is a real giant, which will be very difficult to move, except for another giant, say if “suddenly” the same Yandex wants something more, because not all the same give Google :)
In order to understand how this happened, you need to look a little into history. So the company was founded in Jordan in 2000. First appeared as a mail service, at a time when there were tight limits on hotmail, yahoo mail, in some places they took money for mailboxes, and google did not exist. Naturally, in the conditions of complete emptiness of the Maktub - it occupied itself. To their credit, they began to develop quite dynamically! Their motto is, never stop!
Maktub’s offices are located in five countries, mainly in Jordan, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait. With more than 300 employees, it has its own Maktoob-Research research center for trend studies, which brings together 2 million subscribers from 30 countries.
Maktubu also belong to:
the largest in the BV (Middle East) Auctionsouq.com is the
only BV payment system cashu.com (last year the Russian webmoney began to cooperate with them)
its own search engine araby.com
The founders of Samih Toukan, Hussam Khoury are not interesting to us, but the third founder of Fadi Ghandour is a legendary person, this is the person about whom books are usually written. I am proud that I personally know this person :) And that's why.
It’s rare when it comes across a very insightful, pragmatic and talented manager. He was able to understand, feel and do what many did not even want to hear about. To earn initial capital and invest in an Internet company, this is the first Arab company to conduct an IPO on NASDQ and in the process, do not manage it, but quit in order to establish another company aramex.com in paralleland in nine years, lead it into leaders in its segment of express mail, if in 2004 Fadi cautiously said in an interview that Aramex has the right to be considered the fifth company (in the Middle East and North Africa) along with FedEx, DHL, TNT, UPS, then At the beginning of 2009, he threw these companies out of the Middle East market! It is enough to give an example, Aramex - became the main postal company in Jordan, having received a contract to send everything, including court decisions.
news Maktub is no longer Arabic, was sold yesterday by Yahoo on all photos Sami Tukan is not very happy with the deal. So I’m right in the main trend, the Western world became interested in arabnet, well, gentlemen, as long as there is a chance to attach an ass, although the time seems to be less and less
Bayt.com
In parallel with Maktub in 1999, Bayt.com appeared, which means a translation from the Arabic house :)
A little bit of lyrics, I remember when I arrived in Jordan in 2000, then I met a girl on the street who stopped me and started telling me what the Internet, and how through it I can find work easily and easily, I told her that actually I came to do this, she gave me a business card, it was empty and there was only one link on it http: // www. bayt. com
9 years have passed, three and a half million profiles (currently) crazy traffic and a perfectly monetized site, the employer pays for all his vacancy announcements. How did it happen? The answer is as simple as all the moneybags of the east thought, where to buy? And where to sell? The guys from Lebanon had a head start to promote the only job search site until 2004. My respect, good design, good search, and most importantly reputation. If someone is looking for work in the space from the Maghreb to Sri Lanka, then they are looking for it at bayt.com
news
aljazeera.net
It’s all simple, there is the Qatari TV channel Al Jazeera, which is fully funded by Qatari gas and oil, the merit of management that they managed to get the money right and create the Arabic analogue of CNN, that is, completely independent, professional television, due to the insane The channel’s popularity, its site is the main source of news on the Arab network.
alarabiya.net
As evil languages say, the Americans did not like such a monopoly in the news segment, and they created another television project “al arabia”, what can I say, money and apparent independence, and sometimes criticism of the USA in the region, did their job, the second and last a source of news in the Arab network alarabiya.net
IMHO: If these channels and sites are visited, then the Rusya Liem TV channel is analogous to Russian Today in Arabic - no one is watching, and the site has almost zero traffic, which unfortunately says only one thing, about “Our talent” to master the budget quite money, in its own way.
Social networks
jeeran.com
Laith Zraikat is a dentist, and just a good guy! All in the same 2000, significant for me, at the peak of the collapse of the dotcoms, I had a friend Laith :) He was interested in hosting and portal development, then it will be blogs and socialization ...
Now things are like this:
One and a half million users, six million unique monthly visits, 650,000 active sites and 120,000 blogs, and a sold shareholding of intel capital for $ 20 million in May this year.
If someone in the Arab world needs a site or a bolg, a gallery, a video, then he will most likely go to jeeran.com , everything is clear for him, there is his own community, which is explained in a language that he understands, and can always help, it’s convenient there, because the word jeeran means “neighbors”.
Finance
zawya.com
Zauiya - translates as "corner", this is a good financial agrigator, in English for investors. The most amazing thing is that they started as an independent project, that is, they collected and provided all the data on their own, for several years they became one of the most popular websites for stock information, but I’ll say a little more about these guys from tickerchart.com , because , as I have the most direct relation, both to the company and to their product.
tickerchart.com
When I met a guy named AbdulMuiz Abukhalaf his proposal to me seemed interesting, at that time (2003) I was finishing documentation and punching in the ministry to open VoIP and satellite Internet provider JB telecomI’ll write about them separately separately, but since it all lasted a long time, as I said, I accepted the offer and got a job as a developer, so there were two of us in the company !!! :) literally a month later, a student who had just graduated from high school was pulled up, and there were three of us. Muiz was engaged in management, I actually sculpted the site, and wrote the first version of the program under the name TickerChart since the launch of the projects was shamelessly delayed, then I was allotted for “whole” one and a half months. Without further ado, 5 parsers were written, and the main client program was quickly written. And the promotion began. After 3 years, TickerChart already had four employees but! I don’t know whether you will be surprised or not, but almost all Arabic-language websites (newspapers, forums, financial institutions) buy content from TickerChart after the 2nd version of the website and the client’s program, I wrote the kernel of the third version, and left the company,
At the time I left the company, we had 14,000 subscribers (client programs), more than half a million unique visits per month (site), and 140 sites of content subscribers. The annual turnover reached (according to my estimates) up to one and a half million a year. Two-room office, five computers, one server, and four employees ... One director-manager-founder. One developer, one programmer, one marketing department, all together part-time support service.
Eh ... Nice time was.
Brief summary
In general, the situation is like this, of course, without fish and cancer - pike, of course, the Arab Internet is not empty and waterless, of course it has its own players, but there are so few of them! What I wrote is the tip of the iceberg, then there is a lot of things, but most importantly, I wanted to show that there is not so much competition, of course there are a lot of sites, but serious (not necessarily financially) at least technically extremely small, and there is where to deploy , but more on that later ...
PS I don’t know in which blog to define the topic, I didn’t find anything suitable :(
On the advice I temporarily put the topic in Social networks