A new transnational arena? An analysis of cross-border web traffic towards professional online news sites in the Arab world

Abstract

In recent years, Arab news industries have been confronted with an unparalleled increase in demand for journalistic offers. In parallel, Internet penetration throughout the Arab world has increased significantly, leading to a shift of consumption away from traditional channels towards the digital realm. This article addresses the impact of those recent developments on a shared transnational communicative arena throughout the Arab world. It includes geographically disaggregated traffic data of 630 inductively collected professional online news sources. Using a network analysis approach, it has been assessed that indeed, cross-border consumption of professional online news is a common and general feature in the region. Traffic flows between the countries are highly diversified without patterns of sub-segmentation. At the same time, the strength of traffic flows reflects the traditional leading role of the media industries in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Yet, weaker traffic flows between the other Arab countries are common and diverse, leading to a high overall integration of the Arab transnational communicative arena within the digital realm.