Top 10 most visited websites in the Middle East and Africa, October 2012

The Middle East is an example of phenomenal growth in Internet, and in particular, social media growth. Still, many of the same sites that are most popular in the developed
world are also the most popular in the Middle East, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo! and Wikipedia.

The most visited websites in the Middle East and Africa are the big international brands such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft sites, Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Apple, followed by Vevo, Ask.com, Amazon and Twitter, according to comScore in October 2012. Internet adoption in Africa and the Middle East is behind the rest of the world’s. However, the pace of growth is phenomenal.

Internet growth in Morocco grew more than 16,000 percent, Egypt grew 6,500 percent and the Middle East grew more than 2,600 percent. In Africa, Internet penetration is just 15.6 percent, compared to 37.7 percent in the rest of the world, according to Internet World Stats. Nigeria (48.4 percent), Egypt (29.8 percent), Morocco (16.5 percent), Kenya (12 percent) and South Africa (8.5 percent) are the most highly penetrated Internet countries in Africa.

The data set is a part of a collection of 500 revenue and usership trends in mobile, social, Internet, tablet, video and other digital categories, published in the 200-page Global Digital Media Trendbook 2013. GDMT, in its eight year, is to be published by World Newsmedia Network, a not-for-profit media research company, in September 2013. To subscribe to the PDF report and/or the tablet edition, go to www.wnmn.org, or contact mstone@wnmn.org.