Type of site Internet encyclopedia Slogan(s) Read in Arabic Alexa rank 1,295 (Global 12/2016) | Available in Arabic Website www.mawdoo3.com | |
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Owners Mohammad Jaber, Rami Qawasmi | ||
Mawdoo3, (in Arabic: 'موضوع; literally "Subject") is an Arabic online encyclopedia that uses the wiki system similar to Wikipedia. It was initially established in 2010 and officially launched in 2012. Based in Jordan, the founders were students at the Hashemite University. They aimed to enrich the Arabic content on the Internet with high quality articles, and offer analysis services for keywords in Arabic. The encyclopedia won the first prize for the Queen Rania National Entrepreneurship Award for the category of universities and academics in 2011. To date the site boast more than 20 million visits per month, of which 12 million are unique, and has published 40,000 articles. With a staff of more than 200 freelance writers they have 20 full-time employees.
Contents
Establishment
The Idea of Mawdoo3 began with Mohammed Jaber, who, when he was studying at the Hashemite University in Jordan, said: "The idea of the project came in late 2009 from reading a book about e-marketing during my summer vacation, which prompted me to read further. I bought three specialized books and read them, which revealed to me the opportunity to build a project to develop a keyword analysis service in Arabic".
In 2010, Jaber and Rami al-Qawasmi founded Mawdoo3 with personal money and that of family and friends. The startup was the recipient of a first prize for the Queen Rania Business Plan Competition Award in 2011, while they were still students. It was officially launched in 2012.
Partnerships
In August 2015, Mawdoo3 announced that it had received $1.5 million in Series A funding from Dubai based investor EquiTrust. This funding was to be invested in supporting Arabic content and increasing the number of Arabic pages on the Internet as per the announcement. In addition, Mawdoo3 entered into partnerships with a number of publishers and institutions to provide them with high quality content: Mutah University, Queen Rania Center for Entrepreneurship, the Islamic World Academy of Sciences, Medical Reference "Altibbi.com", and the technical Arabic dictionary "Arabterm.com".
The way it works
Mawdoo3 uses the wiki system, but unlike Wikipedia, Mawdoo3.com adopts a more centralized operation model to create and upload content. The team is composed of 20 full-time employees, as well as hundreds of writers divided into paid experts and contributors, who write on specific topics according to special content strategy. It publishes original informational articles and rejects opinion, news, and promotional pieces. Prior to publishing, an in-house auditing team verifies the content of every article for plagiarism, and checks for correct language use. Translated articles are also welcome.
Visitors
According to the Alexa website (December, 2016), the distribution of the Arab visitors is as follow: