7 - 13 June 2001
Issue No.537
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 7 - 13 June 2001 Issue No.537 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Thinking Big
Tarek Atia speaks to media maverick Emadeddin Adib, whose Good News 4 Me portal just signed a big deal with US Internet giant MSNBC.com, about the ups and downs of being a web mogul
The Good News 4 Me offices in downtown Cairo look like an Internet company's should: a fancy marble entrance gives way to lots of wide open space and few walls. Since it is a holiday, the vast majority of endless cubicles are empty, giving the place an abandoned feel. But the Internet like the press doesn't sleep, and that's nothing new for Good News Chairman Emadeddin Adib, who is also a veteran journalist. Most people know Adib as the founder of business daily Al-Alam Al-Youm and host of a popular talk show on satellite channel Orbit. But for the past year or so, Adib has also been running a web-based business. "We are not a dot-com company," Adib makes sure to point out. "We are a media company." In fact, the Good News holding company includes ventures in publishing, Internet, film and music, as well as advertising, but "our core business," Adib says, "is content syndication, not only putting sites on the net."
photo: Sherif Sonbol
Although, in this respect, the company has made deals with major local clients like MobiNil (for whom it will provide WAP and SMS content) here in the region, the announcement, in late May, that a contract had been signed between gn4me.com and msnbc.com, was even bigger news in the world of Middle East IT. According to the deal, Good News 4 Me will provide msnbc with a site called gn4msnbc.com, which will include much of msnbc's content in Arabic, as well as original relevant content from the region, provided by Good News 4 Me. The contract was signed at computer giant Microsoft's headquarters in Seattle. Msnbc.com, one of the most widely visited news sites on the net with three million visitors daily, is a joint venture between Microsoft and US television network NBC. The partnership with Good News 4 Me is not the first time the US site has ventured into new territories and languages. There are also Turkish, French and German versions.
Uli Hiller, director of msnbc.com's affiliate programmes, told the Weekly by e-mail from Seattle that the site is, "growing globally and the Arabic speaking countries certainly occupy an important region of the world. We wanted to extend our content to the Arabic countries and reach them in their native language."
Neither msnbc nor gn4me agreed to disclose the details of the financial agreement reached between the two sites.
I remind Adib of what he said at a major conference in Cairo in March, when he began his presentation by saying he would be "short, depressing and to the point," about where the Middle East's Internet economy was heading. Has this changed after the deal with msnbc? Is the Internet sexy again?
"I wasn't just interpreting a personal situation or something concerning our company when I said this," Adib responds. "I was talking about the market. Everybody's talking about what kind of market share they're going to have, but no one's talking about the market size. Going to msnbc is compatible with the way we think; that alliances are the only way you can thrive in this difficult business."
With approximately three million Arab users, the Middle East market is certainly small. "This is a way to escape from the depressing market, or the small market, where you have to wait for years and years until it grows and becomes economically viable," Adib says.
But does he actually expect visitors from outside the Arab world to be interested in the Arabic content offered by gn4msnbc? Adib rattles out the numbers. He's aiming for "Arabic speaking people outside the Arab world. Six million Arabs live in the States. Another 5.5 million Arabs live in France. In Latin America you have 14 million Arabs. To reach these markets you need millions and millions of dollars and hundreds of hours and a big army of marketers." Being part of a well-established brand is a way to circumvent that expenditure.
Regionally, gn4me spared no expense making itself known. It was one of those companies that spent millions advertising its brand on TV and in the papers, even before a majority of Egyptians and Arabs was aware of the scope of the Internet. I asked Adib if he felt the money was well spent. "Yes," he answered unequivocally. "Now the image in the market is that we are the strongest content provider in the Middle East. This is the image. We succeeded in creating it. Is it right, is it wrong? That's left for the consumer or the visitor to decide."
Actually, I interjected, "a lot of people were disappointed after seeing the adverts and going to the site. Some of it wasn't working and some of the things in the advert didn't actually exist."
Unfazed, Adib answered, "The campaign was about gn4me as a concept. It was sort of a soft opening. You put in what you have, bit-by-bit, and through the connectivity and the market research and the e-mails you receive, via relations with the users, you start to upgrade. There is no point doing it 100 per cent based on assumptions, and then discovering that it's not what the consumer wants."
In its present form, the portal features a large amount of content tailored to many different types of users. There's business news, fatwas, recipes, fashion and an on-line radio station. It is a mixture of Adib's varied media holdings, which include Al-Alam Al-Youm, Kolelnas and Adam magazines and glossy society publication, Party, which was launched with gn4me. Adib explains that the site is like a display window for a wide variety of content which can then be tailored to individual clients' needs.
Declining to discuss the specifics of the company revenues or projections, Adib makes clear that cash was coming in from day one, thanks to varied revenue streams, including content development and syndication, consultancy services, and revenue sharing. He predicts that the current 60 employees will double soon.
"The market in the Arab world is green," Adib says. "It's virgin, and can sustain a lot of investment with a lot of promise of return. The problem," in his view, "is that when some people tried to adopt the NASDAQ model in the Middle East, they lost faith in investing in dot-com and media companies." (The "NASDAQ model" describes the hype surrounding Internet companies, which leads to over-investment, followed by spectacular busts when the cracks in business models become plain.)
In Adib's view, "the NASDAQ model is the end of a cycle which has not yet started in the Middle East."
If true, IT may be in for an exciting, if turbulent, time.
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