Al-Masry Al-Youm website topped a list of best Arabic websites issued yesterday by the Arab Thought Foundation as part of its third cultural development report. Newspapers were ranked according to the number of visits to the websites according to the Google Ad Planner service. The visitor statistics are gathered using a number of methods: counting one visitor's frequent visits to one website once, counting users' infrequent visits, counting the number of pages viewed more than once, or calculating the average time of viewing the website per minute. Al-Ahram newspaper occupied second position in the list, and was the only other Egyptian newspaper to be featured on the list. Saudi Aِl-Riadh and Okaz ranked the third and fourth respectively, while Lebanese newspaper As-Safir and the London-based Al-Hayat dropped to tenth and eleventh positions respectively. The Kuwaiti Al-Qabas occupied twelfth position, Qatari Al-Rayah came in at sixteenth, and Asharq Alawsat occupied the last position. In a related context, Youm7 ranked number one in Forbes Middle East's list of the Top 50 Newspapers Online in the MENA Region. The magazine wrongly calculated the number of visits to Al-Masry Al-Youm's new website, neglecting the older one which enjoys high viewership rates that reach four times those for the new website, according to the Alexa index on which Forbes depended. Al-Masry Al-Youm was placed at 26 in the list, while Al-Dostour was ranked at number 16. Translated from the Arabic Edition.
