What Are the Top 50 Social Brands in the GCC?

Gulf Business and Grafdom have recently released a new report, compiling data from Social Watchlist and Social Bakers, that highlights the “50 most influential and recognizable brands in the GCC” based on their popularity on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Based on the number of Likes + Followers + Subscribers, GCC inhabitants’ top 2 brands are Al Arabiya and Al Jazeera English. Al Arabiya has almost double the amount of Facebook fans and 60 times as many followers on Twitter, yet Al Jazeera English is phenomenally big on YouTube. Combined with Al Arabiya's YouTube reach, the 2 channels are worlds apart from everything else. 

With 26 000+ subscribers, their closest rival is STC with slightly under 10 thousand subscribers, but the gap becomes even more ridiculous when you look at views: 387+ millions for Al Jazeera alone. Combined, these 2 news outlets dwarf the rest of the brands combined.

Other stats include...

10 Arabic Web Fonts You Can Use Right Now (5 Free + 5 Paid)

"Web Design is 95% Typography"

An audacious statement made back in 2006 by a certain designer called Oliver Reichenstein, founder of the famed Tokyo based design firm Information Architects. That declaration got designers all worked up at the time. Some cheered it, others were not so pleased. His logic was the following:

"95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography."

Sounds reasonable enough, (but if you disagree, take it to the comments section). In the meantime we think you ought to check out these 10 Arabic web fonts that we've compiled for you, 5 free and 5 paid, cos as we've demonstrated above, web fonts are very very important.

What Are the Top Applications on iTunes in Egypt?

We recently paid a visit to iTunes to find out which were the most popular downloads among iPhone users in Egypt.

It is worth pointing out that iTunes 11 was released on the 29^th of November 2012, and has been met with a lot of criticism, because of its radical change from the previous version, which confused many users, including myself, as it's not easy to locate many features on the new interface.

Read on to find out which were the 6 most popular apps!

Google Unveils the Top 10 Most Watched YouTube Clips in MENA [Video]

Following its 2012 Zeitgeist report, Google recently announced the ten most popular videos in the MENA region in 2012, which include music and comedy clips, entertainment, blogs and users.

On average, the number one video site, which was founded in the United States in 2006, receives 260 million views each day.

“This year, we looked not just at views, but also shares, searches, likes and responses (…) to ensure that we truly captured the captivating moments of the year,” stated Tarek Abdalla, Marketing Manager in the Gulf region.

Watch the videos inside!