I was reading an interesting article on Beirut Spring on how a recent survey of readers of more than 400 blogs in Lebanon has shown that their numbers are close to the online readership of the most well-known Lebanese newspapers: both averaging 14,000 visitors daily.
It is true that there are some blogs who average a large number of visitors daily such as the BeirutSpring and even our blog but i think those numbers are exaggerated and miss out on a major source of information in Lebanon which are the Lebanese Political sites and News portals. LF website, FPM website, Kataeb website, lebanonfiles.com, elnashra.com and many others are way more visited than the most popular newspapers out there.
Most Lebanese rely on websites that relate to their political allegiance rater than check out newspapers for two reasons:
1- A lot of newspapers are politicized and are dull to read.
2- Political websites and portals are way more updates (by the second) than online papers.
Update: Last but not least, once we started blogbaladi, i looked for as many Lebanese blogs as I could find and i could not find more than 100.
I am as curious as Mark to know where those 400 came from?
I am curious to how he calculated that there are 400 blogs in Lebanon. Where is his source?
The writer also seems to confuse Facebook and blogs with each other since he talks about bloggers and then he gives facebook examples.
Lebanese blogs are still young without much viewership or followers. There is no way local blogs get as much traffic as Naharnet. I doubt all the Lebanese blogs combined get as much traffic as Naharnet alone. I also highly doubt Naharnet gets just 14,000 visitors a day.
He closes by saying Lebanese bloggers are “on their way to becoming pioneers in the Arab world”. I would also have to disagree with that statement. Blogs in Lebanon as I mentioned are still young and don’t have the widespread viewership, experience or influence as blogs in say Egypt or the Gulf so not sure how we’re going to be pioneers in a field that already has been pioneered.
We do have a lot of potential though.
was i too negative? lol
I think you were too kind.
btw, there could be more than 400 blogs and there could be less than 100.
I don’t know how many Lebanese blogs there are, I just know it’s impossible to know how many Lebanese blogs there are.
Thats why I am curious to how he found that number.
While we’re at it, where did he get the number 14,000 as well? Who did the survey, where are the results?
It’s a little unrelated but I always wondered why the News Papers in Lebanon don’t try to stop the Political parties from publishing their articles on their Websites.
Go to any political site, half the stuff they publish are copied from someone with a tiny source hidden somewhere without even a link!
Why don’t they force them to publish an extract with a link to the complete article!
A good place to start for your Leb blog stats would be Lebanon Aggregator. Not sure it comes up to 400, but definitely more than 100!
http://lebanonaggregator.blogspot.com/
That’s not accurate, u need to add a blog manually to it and not everyone knows about it and not everyone cares to be part of it so it’s really not a starting point. There is simply no way to know how many Lebanese blogs there are.
FYI: Back in 2005 when Lebanese blogs were starting to pop everywhere, we started a Lebanese blog aggregator, and by the end of the July 2006 war there were over 600 active blogs on the aggregator. Some blogs died afterwards and many more new ones rose… unfortunately, we killed the aggregator 2 years ago.