If you watch Arabic satellite news channels, you must have noticed that more female reporters are covering the conflicts in Lebanon and Palestine.
On Al Jazeera, in particular, females outnumber males.
Although this may seem normal to a Westerner, it resembles an interesting development for Arab media and societies, which traditionally ’shelter women’ in conflicts.
Read a story about this in Arabic at Al Jazeera’s Website.
August 3rd, 2006
The war raging between Lebanon and Israel is causing a massive jump in the traffic of Arabic news sites, with the biggest impact reported by Al Jazeera.
Al Jazeera.net claims to have registered 6 million ‘visits’ yesterday, and leaping in rankings from 190 to 113.
It’s not clear were they got the ranking data from, but if you run a check on Alexa, you’ll get the following results: Today’s rank is 127, this week’s average rank is 146 and the 3 months average is 290. So, it’s quite an impressive leap.
These numbers, if validated, would make AlJazeera.net the top Arab site in terms of traffic. At least, for the duration of this conflict.
Here’s the announcement (in Arabic). Al Jazeera is headquartered in Qatar.
July 19th, 2006
With the World Cup finished, the next big sporting event to witness a possible ‘advertising circus’ could be the 15th Asian Games in Doha, Qatar, to be held between 1 and 15 December, 2006.
The sponsorships are not complete yet, and seem to be missing the usual international consumer brands.
The event’s Prestige Partners are Qatar Airways, Qatar National Bank, QTel and Samsung. Official Partners are General Electric (GE), Tissot, Pocari Sweat and BeanPole.
More sponsors and partners are on the way, but where are the typical sports sponsors like Coca Cola or Pepsi, McDonald’s or even a car company?
Also, so far, it’s not clear what kind of advertising revenue can be expected from the Asian Games, but Al Jazeera Sport will be broadcasting the games live, around-the clock for two weeks. As will some terrestrial channels in the region. That’s a lot of TV air time!
In any case, the advertising campaign for Doha’s Asian Games is shaping up nicely.
Check out a TV commercial here that ran a few months ago and visit the 15th Asian Games website where there are more commercials and promotions.
July 12th, 2006
