The New Face of Arabia.com: More Engagement, More Channels, More Markets, New Design –the future of Arabic online portals

UAE, Dubai, 03 November 2013 — As part of always offering the latest and the best, Arabia.com has reinvented itself to give you more of the things you've always loved about it in a better package. With the relaunch of Arabia.com as a touch friendly, highly socially integrated page, there's more to the whole experience and the new look and feel comes with a host of additional features we're sure our visitors will love.

Mostafa Kamel, Managing Director of LINKonLINE, was particularly keen to discuss some of his favourite new features: “with our new loyalty program, you can win something new every time. This gives our users more incentive to engage, and it also builds stronger relationships with them, with continuous connectivity between us. To help our visitors interact comfortably, we've launched a personalisation feature that lets them choose their channels and curate their own content, content that they can link up to all their favourite social networks and share everywhere.”

Expanding on the importance of social media: “We've made a conscious effort to develop a system based on how our users want to receive and consume our content, and social media, like our Instagram-based livestream page, Arabia Now, searchable by user accounts and hashtags, was essential for this overhaul. The first of its kind in the region, Arabia Now is content aware, showing live feeds from Instagram based on a behind-the-scenes automated scan of keywords in the article. Basically, we've redesigned based on what we know matters to our users.”

Since the revamp, Arabia.com's numbers have shown a sustainable month on month growth of almost 20% and a decrease in bounce rate to less than 5% .  Arabia.com is clearly on the right track, building its presence socially and regionally.

The key to their new loyalty program is a gamification system that is based on rewards, leading up to generating more activity and logins, as well as feedback from the readers. From sharing to watching, reading, personalising, or simply logging in and following Twitter and Facebook feeds, the idea is to simply give readers more of what they want, and push away the elements of the website that are not relevant to them.

This user-centric approach is clear and becomes more necessary when we look at their demographic. Research shows a 75% internet penetration in the UAE, with numbers above 60% for most of the GCC and users in the region spend an average of 2 hours daily online. With data showing that so much web surfing regionally is happening off of tablets and with their users globally becoming more and more mobile, the new overtly tablet inspired design works very well in their market.

The idea behind this push is to create an Arabic portal that reaches all audiences, says Mostafa Kamel. He adds: “From over 100 million Google searches per day in the region, 54% of them are in Arabic, so there clearly is a huge market out there that is looking for content in their native language. It is our job to provide them with this material and ensure that we design for an Arabic readership, not with the Arabic readership as an afterthought. From the gamification systems that we've put into place to the various touch points and the refreshed design, and especially our social integration, we plan on branching out to give our visitors access to everything they need and truly become their news and information portal online.”

When it comes to content, they've studied their readership thoroughly. Statistics for the region have found that women are a dominant force in online content in the GCC. Women outnumber men in accessing online content for almost every category that Arabia.com caters to. Men only outnumber women in two other categories, however: business content and news and weather sites. Out of 15 categories, 11 favor female readers.

So, clearly, most of the Arabia.com readership is female. There is, however, a clear market for male readers, and so they've broken into it, with a new section for men featuring Wadih el Najjar, a celebrity photographer and renowned socialite, alongside their various other channels: travel, technology, cars, games, sports, and women.

Mostafa Kamel adds: “With a product that is fantastic to use, that gives them immediate access to all the features they'd need, we simply had to maintain the level of our content, but we opted to revolutionise that too: gamification, Arabia Now, touch-based designs, and holistic user based approach to how we produce and publish content.”

Arabia.com: Arabia launched in 2012 and is now one of the major players in the region's online media as a one stop portal that covers everything about men and women's lifestyles, cars, technology, travel, and sports, offering unique user experiences and features that are still new in this market, such as gamification, personalisation, and deep integration with social media, making it a very engaging product to users.
From sharing to watching, reading, personalising, or simply logging in and following Twitter and Facebook feeds, the idea is to simply give readers more of what they want.