Naharnet

History

Naharnet was founded in 1998 and launched in September 2000 as the first multilingual Lebanese portal still active today. Naharnet provides users worldwide with a wide array of services spanning from news coverage, forums, mobile services, chat, and email amongst others. Over the years, Naharnet has built a considerable audience, attracting millions of Lebanese users worldwide from over 220 countries. In 2010, Naharnet started revamping its strategy and technology to focus on being a Digital News hub for Lebanese worldwide. The aging technology behind Naharnet was replaced on May 25, 2011 by a brand new Content Management System developed in house, setting the grounds to build and provide next generation content and services to its global audience. Newsdesk

Naharnet’s newsdesk is staffed with a multilingual team of journalists providing users with up to the minute news, seven days a week. The team of journalists behind Naharnet’s newsdesk is balanced to represent the social fabric of the Lebanese society and to provide objective and unbiased reporting. Editorial Policy

Naharnet is not affiliated to any political parties and runs independently of any other media organization. Naharnet is privately held and self-sustainable, making it the one of the rare independent media organizations in Lebanon free from external influences. Naharnet is commited to providing its users with objective news coverage. Naharnet’s Newsdesk focuses exclusively on factual news and refrains from publishing opinions and analysis. Naharnet’s news team gathers and monitors various sources of information including internal sources, news wires, TVs, radios, news sites and social media in order to produce accurate and verified reports. Statistics

Over 2 million unique visitors, mainly Lebanese, come to Naharnet annually from more than 220 countries.
1,200,000+ users have signed up on Naharnet over the past 10 years
810,000+ pages have been published in English and Arabic
1,000,000+ Comments have been published by users
Over 1,000,000,000 ad impressions were served globally
300,000+ Tweets were published mentioning Naharnet.com on Twitter.com
There is an average of 240 simultaneous users on Naharnet.com. Naharnet has recorded peak usages of over 1,000 simultaneous users. Over 60% of users visit Naharnet.com at least once per month
Over 40% of users visit Naharnet.com at least once per week. Over 20% of of users visit Naharnet.com over 200 times per year



Development team

The technology behind Naharnet was developed in-house and is currently in beta stage. Our teams of developers release new features, updates and fixes improving the platform and gathering feedback on a daily basis. Technology

The new Naharnet platform is the first Lebanese site built using Ruby on Rails. Naharnet.com is also the first Lebanese site hosted on Amazon’s Cloud and is built to scale automatically following traffic patterns. The platform was completely built in-house as one of the world’s first Semantic Content Management System. Innovation is at the heart of our development efforts and all features were developed to tackle the specificities of the Arab Web and Arab Users.