Gulf residents are the world's heaviest users of the online video-sharing site YouTube, according to a senior executive at Google.
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Residents of the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait view the most videos on the site, said Mohamad Mourad, the manager for the Gulf region at
[ Google ]
, which acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion (Dh6.06bn) in 2006.
"You're actually doing more YouTube views per day than the average globally," Mr Mourad said. "So people like video in this part of the world. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait have the highest consumption of YouTube per capita in the world."
Video is one of the fastest-growing online categories globally. It makes up 40 per cent of global web traffic, and will exceed 91 per cent by 2014, according to forecasts from Cisco.
While advertising on video sites has lagged, some analysts forecast this will rise with the increasing use of portals such as YouTube, which earns its revenue from advertising. Mr Mourad said there were now 120 million YouTube views per day originating from internet users in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region.
Recent unrest in the region also boosted YouTube views and internet use, he said.
In Egypt, "we saw some mind-boggling statistics," he said. "There were one million new Facebook users in the first week of February, people signing up in Egypt. People were calling the call centres of the ISPs in Egypt telling them 'we want Facebook'.
"There was a 10 times increase in news searches, and there was a 50 per cent YouTube upload growth. People were uploading more on YouTube as a result of that."
But Mr Mourad said that while the use of sites such as YouTube and Facebook was rising, other sites did not provide a "sophisticated" environment for the region's 100 million internet users.
"The bad news is that the quality of the internet is really not that good," he said. "The level of sophistication of internet use in the Middle East is still way behind everywhere else."
Mr Mourad, who was speaking at the TMT Finance and Investment Middle East conference in Dubai, said media firms and telecommunications providers "need to partner" in helping to boost Arabic content online, such as that for small businesses.
"Today, 10 per cent of businesses in the Mena region have websites - just 10 per cent. And I'm not going to comment about the quality of these websites," he said.
"We need to partner so that we all play the role in finding something that will help the users have a more sophisticated and more rich internet experience in this part of the world."
