While I've been away from the computer on other business the last two days, a reader who actually knows something about all this tech stuff put together data on al-Jazeera's internet site usage over the last year. Here's what they found:
That seems to show pretty strikingly how well al-Jazeera has capitalized on this war. Of course, I would want to know some other things too. How do these trends compare to usage in Arab countries or in Europe, as opposed to the United States? Do other Arab news sites show similar trends - i.e. is al-Jazeera's audience exploding while others like al-Arabiya stay flat or decline, or are all the news stations benefiting from a time of crisis and war?
They also found that over the last week, 85% of al-Jazeera web users were male - an interesting demographic fact which I have no idea what to do with, but others might. In addition, more than 75% its users were under the age of 44 - which I would personally speaking classify as *young*.
I'll be back with actual content tomorrow.
UPDATE: I did an Alexa search to see how al-Jazeera compared with al-Arabiya:
Alexa shows the same huge leap in al-Jazeera's audience the last few weeks as did my reader above (as well as the spike in traffic around the time of the Danish cartoons incident) - and also shows that al-Arabiya has not experienced a comparable spike in traffic. That does tend to support the "al-Jazeera has owned this war" thesis.
surely a great bulk of A-J's web readers are young khaleejis and expat Muslims in internet cafes in the gulf and europe, no?
Posted by: praktike | July 26, 2006 at 02:23 AM
Hello Mr Lynch,
www.alexa.com offers free statistics on websites worldwide. The statistics are sample-based and therefore biased in some way or the other, but for overall trends they should do. There's an option to see a ranking of most visited arabic sites as well, if you click around a little.
Best regards,
Björn Bentlage.
Posted by: Björn Bentlage | July 26, 2006 at 03:45 AM