Saudi Sees Strong Growth In Digital Arabic Content

Demand and supply of digital Arabic content in Saudi Arabia has been on the rise with 97 per cent of internet users preferring to browse the web and social media in Arabic.

Around 60 per cent of Saudi’s population uses social media and the Kingdom is one of the fastest growing countries for social media use.

The Kingdom also accounts for more than half the region’s active users on Twitter, adding around a million users last year. This brought the total number of Twitter accounts to 1.9 million representing a growth of 128 per cent.

These users tweet 50 million times per month constituting more than 47 per cent of the total tweets in the MENA region. Around 90 per cent of these tweets are in Arabic making Saudi the largest contributor of Arabic content on Twitter.

YouTube too has been witnessing strong growth owing to a rise in viewership and local content production. There are around 90 million YouTube views a day from Saudi making it the biggest consumer of YouTube content per capita in the world.

About half of YouTube views come from mobile devices, driven by the high smartphone penetration rate that stands at 188 per cent in the Kingdom.

The rise in demand for YouTube content has also led to more video production studios opening in Saudi.