Internet use is on the rise across the Middle East. But can Arabic content keep pace with growing demand?
As the revolutions of Arab Spring swept through the Middle East, the rise of internet usage, particularly social networks like Facebook and Twitter, came into the global spotlight. Organized partly through web-based tools, and endlessly discussed online, Egypt's uprising in particular has often been dubbed a Twitter or Facebook revolution. But this surge in global interest, and local usage, belies the fact that Arabic-language content lags far behind.
About 340 million people speak Arabic, roughly 5 percent of the world's population, but experts estimate that less than 2 percent of online content is in Arabic. Subtract ephemera like Twitter updates about what people ate for lunch and content walled off inside forums and closed social networks like Facebook, and the gap between internet users and useful content yawns even wider.
This content gap isn't necessarily bad for business - or at least not for businesses savvy enough to create a solid web presence in Arabic. In Egypt, where Google claims a 96 percent market share, about 70 percent of web searches are conducted in Arabic, says Wael Fakharany, regional manager for Google Egypt and North Africa. In effect, the vast majority of users are searching for information in a very small pool of content. Imagine an Egyptian business selling "office supplies," a term that returns in excess of 300 million results in Google Egypt's English-language search portal. The Arabic equivalent (adawat maktabeyya) returns 621,000 results - a much smaller group of competitors. If that hypothetical office supply company were to build a clean, well-optimized site in Arabic, it stands a substantially higher chance of pulling in potential customers from Google than would its English-language equivalent.
The scarcity of Arabic content can also be an economic boon to media companies who publish high quality work online. Unlike North America or Western Europe, where the market is glutted with professionally run websites on every topic from childcare to car maintenance, Egypt has very few niche web-portals. "Cooking, fashion, childcare, whatever it is. You can count them on your fingers in Egypt. And the lifespan of these sites is very short. So you can get a website that goes on very well for three to four years, and suddenly it drops, or another one comes out and you have two competing and then they just kind of fade away," says Mohamed El Mehairy, managing director at the digital advertising company Connect Ads. "Take sports, for example. You have two or three portals that all the population relies on - and we're talking about a very big population. And this is not a problem only in Egypt, but a problem in the region."
Local companies hoping to reach a specific demographic - working mothers, or single young men - don't have a lot of options online. For publishers who can deliver the kinds of audiences advertisers are looking to reach, money is there for the taking. "Advertisers have money. Even in crisis times they have money to spend on advertising and marketing," says El Mehairy. "They will not stop spending. The only barrier for them to increase this year-on-year spending growth, I think, is the availability of good local content."
Recognizing this, major players like Yahoo have gotten into the Arabic-content creation business. "When we look at markets around the world, the Middle East is one of the most exciting markets, with a combination of rapid user growth and a very large population coming online, plus a very attractive advertising market with incredible growth potential," said Ahmed Gamal El-Dien, Yahoo's head of sales for North Africa, in an email interview. In November 2009, Yahoo acquired the Arabic web portal Maktoob.com, which gained popularity as the first free webmail service with Arabic support, and rapidly expanded into content production, with various special interest "channels." Now, as Yahoo's official arm in the MENA region, it is the second most visited Arabic-language news site and has expanded into an advertising powerhouse. Its special interest sections devoted to entertainment, business, sports and women's news capture a substantial share of the targeted ad money El Mehairy is talking about. But there's still plenty of room in the advertising market for pages that count their readership in hundreds of thousands rather than millions, and offer ad rates in the reach of smaller, specialty businesses.
Causes
If the economic opportunities are so good, why is so little Arabic content available online? Far removed from the profit-motive, the world of free, user-generated content holds some interesting lessons.
Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia that relies on volunteer contributors and editors for content, has become the sixth most visited website in the world with more than 21 million articles in 285 languages. The Arabic edition, however, comprises fewer than 170,000 entries, less than 1 percent of total content.
Granted, millions of Arabic speakers do not have internet access, or cannot read in their native language. But even with those factors taken into account, the Arab world as a whole still has a notably low participation rate. Norwegian, a language with just 5 million speakers worldwide (the majority of whom also speak English), has more than 330,000 Wikipedia articles available. According to Google's Wael Fakharany, Egypt alone has 30 million internet users.
Most of the Arab world, of course, is far less developed technologically and economically than Norway. But even these factors don't fully explain the discrepancy in rates of participation, says Mark Graham, a research fellow at Oxford Internet Institute. On a global scale, he's found that indicators like internet penetration and GDP are pretty good predictors of how likely people are to contribute to projects like Wikipedia - but not in this region. "In Arab countries, across the board, participation is lower than what you would expect," he says, adding that internet delivery models could be one culprit. Many users in the region rely on USB modems, mobile connections or other packages that cap daily usage or charge by the megabyte. These services may be adequate for checking email or reading news, but they don't encourage users to conduct in-depth research, open multiple tabs or spend the time online to write and edit encyclopedia entries.
Another factor may be differing cultural norms about who is entitled to speak authoritatively on any given subject, says Graham. "People in different places have different ideas about what it means to contribute knowledge," he says. "In some places, a 16-year-old in her bedroom might feel entitled to argue back... maybe in others, there is more deference to authority." He is quick to add that the theory is based on anecdotal, rather than hard, evidence. In April, his team tried to organize focus groups in Jordan, but could not get enough people to attend. "That itself tells us a lot about participation," he notes.
Recognizing the underdeveloped potential of its Arabic encyclopedia, the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia, has made developing Arabic content a strategic priority, says Barry Newstead, the foundation's head of global development. It has organized workshops and online outreach efforts, and is working to form partnerships with universities, libraries, archives and businesses to develop more content. In the process, the foundation has learned more about non-technical barriers to participation.
One issue that often crops up is people's aversion to writing in formal Arabic, says Moushira Elamrawy, an Egypt-based consultant for the foundation. Across the Middle East and North Africa, day-to-day communication is conducted in a wide variety of local dialects. The Arabic spoken in the streets of Morocco would not necessarily be understood in Cairo, nor would a young Cairene's Arabizi - local slang transliterated into Roman letters for easy texting and chatting - be entirely comprehensible to those with a more classical education. Each dialect, in turn, has a grammar and vocabulary distinct from the formal Arabic - often referred to as Modern Standard Arabic or MSA - that is the official language of media, government and higher education.
Most internet users can read and understand MSA, but far fewer are comfortable writing in it - even, says Elamrawy, knowledgeable, well-educated academics and professionals. People with valuable, specialized knowledge in fields like engineering, economics or healthcare, who might otherwise be happy to contribute their expertise to Wikipedia articles, often don't do so because they find writing in MSA too difficult, or are worried about making embarrassing errors. In one attempt to counter this problem, an Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia was launched in 2008 by a group of local volunteers. But the effort never really caught on, Elamrawy says, because the language was too informal.
Now, Wikimedia Foundation efforts focus on the MSA edition and consist mainly of recruiting partner institutions and building and training a community of volunteer editors and contributors. In the near future, though, Newstead hopes the foundation also will be able to develop technologies to help lower the language barrier created by formal MSA. "We're talking to folks to create tools for correcting common spelling and grammatical errors," he says. "Kind of like an autocorrect feature in a word processor." Not only could such a tool help Wikipedia contributors, it could also be adapted for other platforms, where users face the same issues.
Initiatives
The technology Wikimedia hopes to develop is just one initiative among many aimed at increasing Arabic on the web. Google, which has a staff of 46 engineers and language specialists dedicated to Arabization, has been at the forefront of these efforts. At its core, of course, is the algorithm Google uses to search and organize the web. It is constantly being refined to improve search returns for queries in Arabic, says Fayeq Oweis, Google Egypt's Arabic localization manager. For example, he explains, if you search for the word "book" in English, Google's engine is smart enough to automatically bring up content with both "book" and "books." But in older iterations of the search algorithm, if you searched for the word "kitab" in Arabic, you would not get results for the plural, "kutub," which has a different linguistic structure.
In addition to refining and correcting search functions, Oweis's team works to localize all new Google products - translating the user interface and support documents, optimizing design for a right-to-left orientation. It's not always simple, Oweis concedes. For example, one recent project was to Arabize Google+, where group video chats are dubbed "hangouts" - which has no exact translation into MSA or a dialect version recognizable across the entire Arab world. "There is no special term to give the function of this," Oweis says.
Its search functions and user forums rely on MSA rather than regional dialects, but the company has also made efforts to ease some of the difficulties Arabic speaking users may face with the language. Introduced in 2009, Google ta3reeb converts text transliterated phonetically in Latin letters into Arabic script. Last December, it launched a voice search service that allows users of iOS (Apple) and Android mobile devices to search in 10 Arabic dialects, including those used in Egypt, the Levant and the Gulf. "We are providing tools to the users, and these tools are supporting and allowing people to be creative and create content," says Oweis.
Catching up
For some of those in the trenches of web design, though, products and services aimed at Arabic users still lag disappointingly far behind what is available for other languages. "On the web, the problem that most developers have with the Arabic language is that everything - the software, the way the fonts are rendered, everything - is set up for left-to-right languages. And also most of the software that we use in graphic design is set up for languages that have separate letters," explains Sourena Parham owner of Alefba, which specializes in design for Arabic, Persian and Dari. "The other problem is that the variety of fonts is much higher in Latin or Cyrillic script." Web designers working with the Latin alphabet can work with a library of around 20 "browser safe" fonts, which come pre-installed on virtually every computer and display properly on Macs or PCs. Web font services -which designers can use to ensure that even users who don't have a particular font installed on their computer will still see it properly online - add hundreds of additional free or low-cost options.
Less than two years ago, designers working in Arabic had almost no options for fonts that looked good and read well on most screens. "Basically, there were just two fonts you could use: Tahoma and Times New Roman. None of them looks good. They were designed by non-Middle Eastern designers. And they don't look good. They are very ugly," Parham says. Arabic, too, now has web fonts, but not nearly as many and not for free.
Companies without the resources to pay for extensive development work also have limited options when it comes to designing and launching a website. Open-source content management systems like Drupal or Wordpress make it easy for companies to set up a blog or a website for free, and thousands of themes and plug-ins let users with minimal technical know-how get the look and feel they want for very little money. Drupal and Wordpress both support Arabic, offering the option of a right-to-left style sheet that can be activated and customized - but most theme developers don't automatically include this extra feature. "An Arabic speaking person or a Persian speaking person, in most cases they can not buy a theme and use it out of the box," says Parham. "He has to spend lots of money customizing it and making it ready."
And even as software companies solve some of the problems facing Arabic speakers, new technologies bring new obstacles. Mobile internet subscriptions in the Middle East are skyrocketing - according to Google's Fakharany, with 10 million people using the internet from mobile devices in Egypt alone. But not all of those mobile devices support Arabic content. Apple has done well by Arabic speakers - iPhones, iPads, and other iOS devices support Arabic right out of the box. Google's Android operating system, however, did not offer native Arabic support until version 4.0 was released last November. Without patches and workarounds, older versions of Android, which are still in use on more than 95 percent of Android phones and tablets, display Arabic text as a series of disconnected, virtually unreadable letterforms. Likewise, Blackberry's Playbook tablet still does not offer full Arabic support. And popular e-readers like the Nook and Kindle offer only limited support for right-to-left languages, leaving many readers dependent on cumbersome PDF files that don't allow readers to take advantage of key features like changing the font size.
Groundswell
Ultimately, the solution to these problems is likely to lie with local demand and local innovation. If Arabic speakers don't want to wait years for software updates and local support, either the market potential of the MENA region will have to grow so large that multinational companies can't afford to ignore it or local entrepreneurs will have to accelerate the pace at which they are producing software and hardware designed specifically with Arabic speakers in mind.
Fortunately for local users, it looks like both of those processes are beginning to take place. Internet penetration was growing before the Arab Spring and has accelerated since. "Taking Egypt as an example, looking at the online penetration there, the growth in users forecast for 2011 was reached in just two months during and after the revolution, which resulted in 2.5 million new-to-net users coming online," says Yahoo's Gamal El-Dien. "I believe that the revolutions also had an impact on the media consumption habits of people in the region. As news unfolds, people are turning to the internet to have conversations and discussions around these topics, and analyzing the stories as they happen."
Entrepreneurship is on the rise as well, with increasing support from both private and public institutions. Google's Ebda2 business plan competition has provided mentoring and support to digital entrepreneurs across Egypt and will award $200,000 to an up-and-coming project later this month. Yahoo has teamed up with Qatar's telecommunications regulation agency, ictQatar, to support strategic digital planning and entrepreneurship. In Abu Dhabi, the government-backed twofour54, a tax-free media and entertainment zone, provides training, startup funding and logistical support aimed at increasing Arabic content online and in the media.
It may be quite some time before American users sit and wait enviously for an amazing new application or device developed in Egypt to add English-language support. Taking an Arabic-first approach to new products and technologies and developing completely new ideas rather than localizing international ones would require a radical shift in mindset. But with a youthful, energized, and increasingly tech-savvy population, anything is possible.
"I am strong believer in the Egyptian youth. We have 17 million students and more than 65 percent of the people are below 30," says Fakharany. "The potential and opportunities are endless."
© Business Monthly 2012
