There is a severe shortage of online news content in the Arab world, said Mo Elzubeir, founder and managing director of Mediastow, leading media intelligence company in the Middle East.

Though almost every print newspaper has web presence, the Arab world is nowhere near the required volume of content to make people shift to digital media, he said.

Elzubeir said that the recent Booz & Company report titled: ‘The Advent of Digital News in the GCC – Newapaper Publisher’s path to Winning’, which predicted that the inflection point at which digital consumption of news will overtake print will occur in two years’ time, was unrealistic.

“It is true that digital news will overtake print. That is as real as climate change and I don’t see how it would go any other direction. However, the pace at which we are approaching the so-called inflection point is nowhere near the timeline of two years,” Elzubeir added.

“The report goes on to point out some of the most striking barriers to this inflection point. It says media analysts continue to predict the death of print media as internet penetration levels increase; however, that does not appear to have panned out. In fact, internet penetration in the GCC is comparable with that in the West, where inflection point has already been met,” he said.

“There is a long way for digital news business to win the battle against print media despite the deep broadband penetration in key markets in the Gulf. The print media business in these markets has been able to withstand the threat of digital migration,” he added.

Newspaper publishers in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE sold an aggregate 3.23 billion copies in 2010 alone.

The UAE’s mobile broadband penetration is on par with South Korea which tops both the US and UK, a clear proof that migrating to digital platforms is not just about advancement in technology, according to Elzubeir.

Elzubeir said the report missed a very important part of the equation, which is that one of the key influencers of speeding up the migration to digital, which is the size of readership.

“The Booz & Company report goes on to talk about how publishers put their investments in other parts of their portfolio that bring quicker profits, unlike the long-term investment required to become a full-fledged digital news provider. It claims that investments are diverted away from online publishing because it is not attractive,” he added.

“Another issue that is perhaps overlooked is that news alone is not going to make people consume content online. When you look at other models, whether you look West or East, online content covers everything from news to books to movies to others. We have none of it. In fact, we are not even able to consume English content from Amazon, Netflix, due to restrictions that are created by the companies themselves,” Elzubeir said.

“Once the big players in the world, such as Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN and others localise their content, uptake of digital content will spike,” he said. “The only problem with this is that localisation of content from those major players is unlikely to happen in the short-term. The same obstacles that are preventing local players from investing in digital news still stand lack of scale.”

“In my view, the only way such an inflection point can be reached in the next three to five years is if online-only news providers appear and challenge the status quo. As it stands, I don’t see digital news overtaking print in the next 10 years,” Elzubeir concluded. – TradeArabia News Service