Yahoo! Maktoob explains why it is shutting down 27 of its websites

A bit of an uproar has been directed towards

over the past week after our friends at

that the online portal was shutting down 27 of its websites next month.

"Yesterday Yahoo Maktoob users received an email from Yahoo telling them that around 27 sites from Maktoob will be closed," wrote Gaith Saqar.

"These sites include forums and sites that Maktoob have perviously acquired and paid a large sum of money while others are sites that Maktoob it self has developed and launched in house before Yahoo's acquisitions."

It took a bit a while but I managed to

[ Ahmed Nassef ]

, the vice president and managing director at Yahoo! Middle East, on the phone fresh off a plane in in Paris following the Arab Entrepreneur Summit in Washington DC. Here what Mr Nassef had to say after the jump.

Mr Nassef explained that the closure of the Maktoob said is "part of a regular review that actually was ongoing before the acquisition [of Maktoob by Yahoo]."

"It's something that we always try to optimise the user experience that we have," he said.

"We acquired a bunch of sites before and it's not as much of ending but wanting to consolidate a lot of the traffic that's going on and user experience. It makes more sense for our users who are visiting.

"We're not really losing people because users are still going to go [to these sites], it's just going to be a clear path how to get to these places. Maktoob over time, it grew so quickly and we've add so many different sites and we didn't spend so much time on consolidation of these things. We didn't have the resources and it is a matter of prioritisation, but now we do."

I asked Mr Nassef whether he felt that this would effectively cut the amount of Arabic content online after championing the increase of more regional content, a notable question one ArabCrunch commenter posed.

"It's all about focussing where to go to get content," Mr Nassef said.

"Yahoo used to have multiple areas to enter into the site. Now it has a very clear front page and it's easy to find the information you're looking for ... For Maktoob, because of the acquisitions we've done, we've had hundreds of different areas where people could get sports contnet or Islamic content. It didn't make sense. It's not at all about shutting down the content. It's still going to be there but it will just be in a different spot."