São Paulo – The Brazil-Arab News Agency (ANBA) received over 1 million visits in July. The figure, the highest in the agency’s history, leaped from 837,653 in June to 1,000,138 in July, representing growth of 19.4%. The daily average has gone from 27,921 to 32,262 visits. “This growth proves that ANBA is on the right track, that it is succeeding in bringing knowledge about Brazil to the Arab countries and about the Arab countries to Brazil, and that interest in this knowledge is increasing,” says the Marketing vice president of the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce, Rubens Hannun, who underscores that the agency was established by the Chamber in order to increase the flow of information between Arabs and Brazilians.
“I believe that the growth was due to the fact that the agency is updated in real time, to the articles with video, to the creation of the new Tourism section, and to the increased production of articles for the Special Reports and Small Exporters,” says Joel Santos Guimarães, ANBA‘s editor-in-chief and owner of Agência Meios, which coordinates ANBA’s work.
The agency started being updated in real time late last year. “Thus, ANBA has been living up to its role, as the Arab Brazilian Chamber’s news agency, of being the organization’s communication tool for reporting on the evolution of commercial and cultural relations between Brazilians and Arabs. Presenting Brazil to the Arabs and the Arab countries to Brazilians has been ANBA’s main objective,” says Guimarães.
The secretary general of the Arab Brazilian Chamber, Michel Alaby, claims that increased access to the ANBA site is a sign of several factors. “Companies are more interested in doing business with the Arabs, the society is interested in gaining knowledge on Arab culture. This leads us to believe that there is growing interest in ANBA, in seeking information, and that increases the need for us to have the ANBA and Arab Brazilian Chamber sites in Arabic as well,” says Alaby. ANBA already has two versions, in English and Portuguese, and there are plans of having a third one, in Arabic.
In July last year, ANBA received 538,865 visits, at a daily average of 17,382. From January to July this year, the site received 5,211,953 visits. The monthly average was 744,850. In the same period of 2009, ANBA was visited 3,544,580 times. The monthly average during the period was 506,368. In the whole of last year, ANBA received 6,097,282 visits, at an average of 508,106 per month.
ANBA was established in September 2003. Since then, the agency won ten journalism awards. The latest, the Agriculture Ministry Journalism Award, was awarded in March this year. The agency also has an agreement for content reproduction with seven news agencies in the Arab world, plus Agência Brasil, which belongs to the Brazilian government.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
