Hello Arab.net (Part 1)

If you say that I was surprised by the reaction to my last post , then it is nothing to say.

It is nice that, as many have noticed, an erratic, confused, full of spelling errors the article interested in its subject matter.

I am pleased to think that I can be useful to my countrymen, wherever they may be. It is even more pleasant to realize that someone will be able to conquer a new market for themselves, it is also pleasant to think that even those who fail will have a personal, invaluable experience that unfortunately , fortunately, cannot be bought.
')
The list of questions asked to me is impressive. I can not write everything in one topic, and I hardly need it, having estimated (in the draft) I divided it into 6 main parts. Perhaps we will begin.

Heavyweights

maktoob.com

If a Russian-speaking user has a choice in Russian-language search engines, or giant portals, such as yandex, mail.ru, rambler and further descending, then the Arab user has no choice, he has only maktoob.com , maktub - our everything! Maktub - it's mail, galleries, news, games, dating, blogs ... in general, 30 services. This is a real giant, which will be very difficult to move, except for another giant, say, if “suddenly” Yandex wants something more, because it’s not all the same to give Google :)

In order to understand how it happened, you need to look into the history a bit. So the company was founded in Jordan in 2000. It first appeared as a postal service, at the time when there were hard limits on hotmail, yahoo mail, some of which took money for mailboxes, and there was no google at all. Naturally, in the conditions of complete emptiness, the Maktub took her. To their credit, they began to develop quite dynamically! Their motto, never stop!

Maktuba has offices in five countries, mainly in Jordan, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait. The staff is more than 300 employees, there is a Maktoob-Research research center for trends research, which unites 2 million subscribers from 30 countries.

Also Maktubu belong:

Largest in BV (Middle East) auction souq.com

The only payment system BV cashu.com (last year Russian webmoney began to cooperate with them)

own search engine araby.com

The founders of Samih Toukan, Hussam Khoury are not interested in anything for us, but the third founder of Fadi Ghandour is a legendary person, a person about whom books are usually written. I am proud that I personally know this person :) And this is why.

Rarely occurs on the way, a very insightful, pragmatic and talented manager. He was able to understand, feel and do what many did not even want to hear. 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 to leave in parallel to establish another aramex.com company and for nine years to bring it to the top in its speed mail segment 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, by the beginning of 2009, he threw these companies out of the Middle Eastern market! It suffices to give an example, Aramex - became the main postal company of Jordan, having received a contract for the delivery of everything, right up to court decisions.

news Maktub is no longer Arabic, yesterday Yahoo was sold to all photos Sami Toucan is not very happy about the deal. So I am right in the main trend, the Western world is interested in arabnet, but what about the gentlemen, while there is a chance to attach the ass, although time seems to be less and less

Bayt.com

In parallel, in 1999, Bayt.com website appeared, which means translated from the Arabic house :)

Some lyrics, I remember, when I came to Jordan in 2000, I met a girl on the street, who stopped me and started telling me what the Internet is, and how I can find through it easily and not forcedly work, I told her that In fact, I came to do this, she gave me a business card, she was empty and on it, only one link http: // www. bayt. com

It has been 9 years, three and a half million questionnaires (at the moment) crazy traffic and a perfectly monetized site, the employer pays for all of their job ads. How did that happen? The answer is just as simple, until all the fat cats 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 on bayt.com

news

aljazeera.net

Everything is banal here, there is a Qatari TV channel “al jazeera”, which is fully funded by Qatari gas and oil, the management deserves that they managed to get the money right and create the Arabic analogue of CNN, that is, completely independent, professional television, at the expense of insane the popularity of the channel, its website is the main source of news in the Arab network.

alarabiya.net

As evil tongues say, the Americans didn’t like such a monopoly in the news segment, and they created another TV project “Al Arabia”, what can I say, money and visible independence, and sometimes criticism of the United States in the region, did their job, the second and last news source in the Arab network alarabiya.net

IMHO: If these channels and sites are visited, then Rusya Lyom TV channel is the analogue of Russian Today in Arabic - no one is watching, and the site has almost zero attendance, which unfortunately speaks only about one thing, about “our talent” to master budget money, in their own way.

Social networks

jeeran.com

Laith Zraikat is a dentist, and just a good guy! All in the same momentous year for me at the peak of the dot-com collapse, I had an acquaintance of Laith :) He was interested in hosting and development of portals, it will be later blogs and socialization ...

Now things are like this:
One and a half million users, six million unique visits per month, 650,000 active sites and 120,000 blogs, and a sold share of intel capital for $ 20 million in May of this year.

If someone in the Arab world needs a website or a bolg, gallery, video, then he will most likely go to jeeran.com , everything is clear and clear for him, his community is there, which speaks his language, and can always help. it's convenient there, because the word jeeran means “neighbors”.

Finance

zawya.com

Zauiya - translated as “angle”, this is a good financial aggregator, in English for investors. The most striking thing was 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 sites on stock information, but I’ll tell all the data from tickerchart.com about these guys, a little more, because 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 seemed interesting to me, at that time (2003) I was completing documentation and punching in the ministry to open VoIP and satellite Internet provider JB telecom about them somehow I would write separately , but since everything was going on for a long time, then 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, I was assigned to all the "whole" months and a half. 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’re surprised or not, but almost all Arabic-language websites (newspapers, forums, financial institutions) buy content from TickerChart after the 2nd version of the site and the client’s program, I wrote the core of the third version, and left the company for financial reasons (because when the business began, I was lured not only by salary but also by interest) then the amount of payments began to worry the main founder and part-time director, to his credit, he bought me my share, and I went to “free swimming”
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 content subscriber sites. 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 ... It was a nice time.

Short summary

In general, the situation is this, of course, without fish and cancer - pike, of course the Arabic Internet is not empty and waterless, of course it has its players, but there are too 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 much competition, of course there are many, but serious (not necessarily financial) sites, at least technically very little, and there is where to turn , but more on that later ...

PS I do not know which blog to determine the topic, did not find anything suitable: (
On the advice of temporarily stuck topic in Social Networks