It appears that if you unblock it, they will come.
That is certainly the case with the photo-sharing website Flickr, which reports a healthy interest among UAE web users since a ban on the site was lifted last week. Yahoo, the owner of Flickr, says the website is set to receive 12 million page impressions from the UAE this month, following successful negotiations with the country's Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) to have the site unblocked.
Ahmed Nassef, the vice president and managing director of Yahoo Middle East, said on the day before the ban was lifted, Flickr, an image hosting and video hosting website, was tracking 1.5 million page impressions per month in the UAE. That figure is set to increase to 12 million - a 700 per cent increase - "assuming that we keep up the average daily usage", Mr Nassef said. "… Early indications are that there is a huge increase [in traffic]. There has been a sixfold increase in daily unique users and a ninefold increase in page impressions in the UAE," he said.
"It's very big but it's just over the past five days compared to the day prior to the unblock. It would be good to look at [the data] over a month's time and compare." Mr Nassef said "clearly some people had access" to Flickr before the ban was lifted and suggested the availability of Flickr in some zones, or a gradual lifting of restrictions on Flickr, could have been behind the pre-ban traffic figures.
The online research company Effective Measure confirmed Flickr had seen an increase in traffic from the UAE. "Our traffic estimate indeed shows at least a sixfold increase in unique users for Flickr for the UAE market," said Brendon Ogilvy, the vice president of digital insight at Effective Measure. He said that indicated an opportunity for increased advertising sales. "In my view the relaunch of Flickr is certainly a positive step for the digital industry as it potentially opens up a fresh audience for advertisers to access in the future."
Flickr quickly became one of the most popular websites in the world after it was launched in 2004. It was one of the first websites to combine an image storing database with social networking and now hosts more than 5 billion pictures and videos. In March 2005, Yahoo acquired Flickr for an estimated US$25 million (Dh91.8m). The website was blocked in the UAE in June 2005 because it displayed content deemed culturally inappropriate.
The region's online advertising sector is expected to more than triple its share of the ad sector from 4 per cent last year to 13.4 per cent by 2014, according to recent research by the consultancy Booz & Company. According to a company source who declined to be named, Yahoo Middle East has about 40 per cent of the region's online advertising market.