The Long Tail of the Arab Digital Spring

[Commentary] The digital aspect of the Arab Spring has long-tail implications. These are the rapid developments in the diffusion of digital communication technologies and services that virtually every country in the Arab Middle East is experiencing, regardless of how much political turmoil and instability is at play in any particular locale.

The data conveys the picture with just a few quick points of reference:

• Forty percent of mobile phones in the region are smartphones.
• Nearly three-fourths of all residents in the United Arab Emirates own a smartphone -- the highest penetration in the world (South Korea is second).
• Saudi Arabia has the highest Twitter penetration of anywhere in the world (about a third of its population, compared to only 11 percent in the US).
• There is continued growth of Arabic as a percent of tweets in the Middle East/North Africa region. Now nearly 75 percent of all tweets are in Arabic.
• Across the Arab Middle East, two hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• Saudi Arabia is the leading country in the world in terms of YouTube viewers -- 90 million daily views to YouTube; overall, the region is ahead of both Europe and Asia, and just behind North America, as the world’s leading region for YouTube viewers.