Digital expert Omar Christidis, founder of ArabNet, the hub for Arab digital professionals and entrepreneurs, said that Saudi Arabia is currently the largest digital market in the MENA region – with almost 40 percent of all Arabic tweets, half of Wikipedia’s Arabic content and 35 percent of all Arabic content on the web coming from Saudi Arabia.
Furthermore, more than 70 percent of Internet users in Saudi Arabia conduct their searches in Arabic, and almost 60 percent of the Kingdom’s users access Facebook through Arabic accounts. Additionally, Saudi Arabia has one of the highest mobile penetration rates in the world.
He said spite of the fact that Arabic is the 7th most popular language on the Web, Arabic content on the web is no more that 2 percent globally. “We are seeing increasing initiatives to create Arabic content, especially in Saudi Arabia. Arabic online video is one of the hot sectors in Saudi Arabia, which has the highest per capita daily consumption of YouTube in the world.”
