Maktoob launches business portal

Maktoob is set to make its first foray into original reporting with the launch of new English-language business portal for the Middle East.

Maktoob, the most popular Arabic website, will make its first foray into original reporting next week with the launch of an English-language business portal for the Middle East. The portal will be led by David Westley, the former editorial director of ITP's digital arm, and aims to compete with sites such as ArabianBusiness.com, an ITP digital property. It will launch on Wednesday. "It's going to be 24 hours a day, seven days a week," Westley said. "It means that there is a brand new, very professional, very good news service for people who want to know what's going on right now." To produce this constant stream of business news, Maktoob has hired seven journalists based in Dubai, one in the US and two based in Jordan, where Maktoob has its headquarters. Among the editors are Dylan -Bowman, another former ArabianBusiness staffer, but Westley said the site would be fundamentally different from other sites in the region that are offshoots of print publications. "The idea when you are publishing online is to get the story up very quickly," he said. "You don't bury the story three or four paragraphs down. People have less time online, so you really have to hook them right from the start." The site will have interactive features such as the chance for users to rate stories and add comments, with more social networking to be introduced during a second phase. Later plans include an Arabic version of the site. Maktoob attracts 14.7 million individual visitors a month, according to figures released last month by the UK's Audit Bureau of Circulations. The figures showed an average of just over one million visits to the site every day. "Maktoob is in a perfect position to do this," Westley said. "It's got the infrastructure. It's the 150th largest website in the world. It will be bigger than The Wall Street -Journal site in terms of the number of -impressions that come to it." Westley worked for Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, before joining ITP. He disagrees that online-only news organisations cannot generate the advertising revenue to pay a newsroom full of reporters. "A consumer-based print title will have a margin of 10 per cent to 15 per cent," he said. "A business-to-business title, it could be up to 25 per cent. But an online site should have a margin of 40 per cent. "It hasn't got the costs. You set up a template, a way for people to navigate through your site, and then basically you just focus on news. For an online news site, it really is the story that matters." [e-mail]