Yahoo acquires Arab online portal, Maktoob

Internet giant, Yahoo, looking to reach 320 million Arabic speakers across the globe

In an attempt to grow its international business, Yahoo has acquired Maktoob, an Arabic online community.  

On its blog, Yahoo said it will, "join forces with the Maktoob team, the strongest in the region, to create locally relevant content, services, and programming."  Yahoo plans to introduce Arabic versions of its popular Yahoo! Mail, Messenger, Search and homepage.  Eventually it would like to create local versions of its properties such as News, Sports, and Finance, focusing on creating content and services for the specific regions using Maktoob.

Maktoob is no small portal.  It currently reaches 16.5 million people in the Arab world, which it said was one in three people online throughout the region.  Since its launch in the late 90's, Maktoob has grown from 6 million unique vistors in 2008 to 21.8 million this year.  Its page views have grown from 406 million to 1.1 billion during the same time frame, according to comScore.  

Currently, the price of the acquisition has yet to be disclosed, but according to several reports, including this one by Forbes, the price is not likely to exceed $20 million to $30 million.

Keith Nilsson, SVP of Yahoo's Emerging Markets division shared some of Yahoo's strategy for the acquisition on a blog post, stating there are 320 million Arabic speakers around the globe, but less than one percent of online content is written in their language.  Yahoo sees this as an opportunity to meet this growing demand for content and in turn, advertising dollars.  

"We see great growth potential in both audience and advertising in the Arab world and combining with Maktoob.com will allow us to quickly build our presence there," explained Nilsson.

Let's not forget how one of Yahoo's main competitors play in this market - Google already provides services for Arabic speaking people such as its search engine, online calendar and mapping system.