The Middle East has more Facebook users than newspaper readers, a new study has found. Spot On Public Relations, a Middle Eastern PR agency specializing in social media, found that as of May 2010, Facebook has more than 15 million users in the Middle East and North Africa, easily surpassing for the first time the region’s newspaper sales of just under 14 million.
The news comes just over a year after the social networking site introduced an Arabic platform. "Facebook only added an Arabic interface in March of last year, and since then 3.5 million users have been added so there's a very quick growth in the Arabic market," Alexander McNabb, Director of Spot On PR told The Media Line. "We do these studies as an aid to the market, to define the opportunities and help the market grow," he said. "The principal finding was that the number of people now on Facebook in the Middle East is actually higher than the number of newspapers sold in the Middle East. We think that's important because of reach for advertisers: If Facebook lets advertisers reach 15 million people on one platform, they are going to think twice before deciding to deal with well over 200 newspapers."
Gaith Saqer, the founder of Arab Crunch, which covers technology and social media in the Arab world, argued that Middle Eastern advertisers have failed to recognize the popular appeal of online social media and thereby artificially propped up traditional newspapers.
"Newspapers are in a crisis in the US, but we haven't reached this crisis in the Arab world because advertisers are still spending more money on newspapers than online," he told The Media Line. "A lot of them don't understand or appreciate the value of the Internet so newspapers are still doing well in the Arab world."
The report, Middle East and Africa Facebook Demographics, found 70 percent of Middle Eastern Facebook users to be in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, although the study also included Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, Libya and Algeria. The figure does not include Iran, Israel or Turkey. The report also showed a strong gender bias toward male users, with female users making up only 37% of those accessing the site in the Middle East. This compares with the US and UK, where over half of Facebook users are female.
Despite the strong growth in Arabic language users, the study found that around 50% of Middle East and North Africa Facebook users access the social networking site in English; another 25% in French; and 23% in Arabic. Saudi Arabia and Egypt showed the strongest growth among Arabic Facebook users, with each country adding more than one million Arabic language interface users over the past year. "In Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Arabic is very important as most users do not know English," Saqer said. "So once they introduced Arabic, Facebook started to grow, and my information from sources inside Facebook is that the number was 16 million four months ago. Whatever it is, the number is growing fast and the newspaper is becoming an antique product."
The study found that Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia and Yemen are all host to Facebook communities with more than 50 percent of users below the age of 25-years-old. The United Arab Emirates has the oldest Facebook community in the Middle east, with 41 percent of users over 30-years-old; 28 percent 25-29 years old; and 31 percent under 25-years of age.
Nabil Dajani, Chairman of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and a professor of communications at the American University in Beirut, argued that the social media eclipse of traditional newspapers has been long in the making.
"Newspaper readership has been dwindling for a long time," he told The Media Line. "People are fed up with political news and there is nothing in the newspapers which addresses what the average Arab citizen wants. It's just which Arab politician dined with who. Facebook, on the other hand, addresses things people are concerned with."
"Facebook is not common in rural areas or among the poor," Dajani said. "But among the rich, the upper class, the educated and urban people, it is widely spread."
