Yahoo!-Maktoob, the new brand of Yahoo! in the Middle East was the first tangible result of Yahoo's recent acquisition of Maktoob, the prominent Arabic website in the region. Last week The Egyptian Gazette caught up with Ahmed Nassef, the Vice President of Yahoo! in the Middle East to discuss Yahoo's strategy to enhance its presence in the Middle East after this acquisition. Six months ago, Yahoo! acquired Maktoob, can we say that Yahoo! thought of this acquisition because it didn't have strong presence within the Middle East where Maktoob was the number one Arabic portal? Yahoo! already had a big presence in the Arab world as out of its 600 million users all over the world it had 22 million users in the Arab world alone, at the time of the acquisition. But what it did not have was the Arabic content. There were two options for Yahoo! either to start from scratch here or to partner or acquire a well-established entity here. Of course, it made a lot of sense to acquire Maktoob. This acquisition really brings together the best of both entities. Yahoo! is the biggest online media company in the world and has a global knowledge, expertise and best practices, Maktoob had the local knowledge and expertise as it was the biggest online Arabic portal in the region and it had 16 million users at the time of the acquisition as well as the biggest sales organisation for any website in the region. Of course, the biggest share of online advertisements revenues. So when we add both the local expertise of Maktoob to the global scale, leadership and platform that Yahoo! brings, this really creates a perfect combination. Will this acquisition help increase the Arabic content on the Internet in general and Yahoo's site in particular? And are you going to recruit any Arabic content creators? Actually we are starting at the top by getting the leadership of well experienced team members. We have already convinced Hossam el-Sukkari, who was the head of the BBC Arabic team for many years. el-Sukkari worked for the BBC Arabic radio, Arabic TV channel and he also launched the BBC Arabic website. He is now heading our content strategy so he is now in charge of all the editorial staff and is moving very fast to build our internal team of editors and writers for the region. The next step would be to partner with content developers companies in Egypt and all over the Arab world. Apart from hiring a well-experienced team leader, did you think of hiring some junior content developers, fresh graduates may be, even part of your corporate social responsibility (CSR) to help solve the unemployment problem? We are very keen on finding people who have passion for online journalism and usually that means going for the younger generation. In other words, going for those who are used to online surfing, may be bloggers and they do not necessarily need to have professional journalism background. Did you try to approach some of the content developers in Egypt and what was the feedback? Yes, we did approach some of the companies and others have actually approached us and I can assure you that there is a lot of excitement about working together and developing the content for almost 30 million users in the Arab world. Could you give us names of some of the companies that you have approached? Honestly speaking, I can not disclose any names but I may openly say that within the next couple of months we are going to have many exciting announcements that will be very beneficial for our users who will be the biggest winners as they will have access to better quality content. Many online users tend to spend much of their times exploring social networking websites, do you co-operate with these websites on any level? It is just last week that Yahoo! launched a new service called Yahoo! Pulse. This new service will be launched in Egypt within ten days. With this new service, you can link your Facebook and Pulse accounts, sign in on either site, and read your Facebook news feed via Pulse. Moreover, in Yahoo! Pulse you can find a new privacy dashboard where you can fine-tune your sharing settings and control the apps and sites you link to your Pulse account. After the acquisition of Maktoob, will Yahoo! offer new localised services that might be appealing to the users in this region? We are going to automatically customise Yahoo's services to appeal to each user. For instance, we will check what are the certain things that attract you on the Internet, what kind of news do you read, what links do you visit and the next time you visit Yahoo! an automaticwindow will pop up for you with stories similar to what you have previously checked. Of course, all these services will be offered in Arabic and thus will be localised to the users' appeals. Speaking of Yahoo's users, I now understand that you gather all the data you need about your users, but do you give out this data to any entity, maybe governmental entities for security purposes, for example? We have a huge legal department and a specialised department for business human rights. We pay special care to our users' privacy and we never give out their data for any party even the national security offices. A real proof to this is the fact that there are ongoing cases in the court in the US in cooperation with Google and Microsoft to defend our users' privacy. I believe you mainly get your revenues from advertisements, how much do you generate annually worldwide in general and across the Arab world in specific? Worldwide we are a multi-billion-dollar company, so we generate around $70 billion annually. However, in the Arab world, the revenues generated from online advertisements in general are very small compared to the worldwide generated revenues. If we speak with numbers, we can say that the total revenues of advertisements in general in the Arab world count for six to seven billion dollars out of which only less than one per cent goes for online advertisement, which is clearly a very small amount. For us as Yahoo! we generate the biggest share of this small amount. Nevertheless, there is a huge potential for growth here in the region.
