​RT ARABIC HITS 2 MILLION LIKES ON FACEBOOK, BEATS CNN ARABIC

MOSCOW, FEBRUARY 5, 2014 –RT Arabic’s Facebook page has reached the 2 million subscribers milestone, surpassing many other Arabic-language news broadcasters, including CNN Arabic. The combined number of RT Facebook fans in English, Spanish and Arabic has passed the 4 million mark.

“We are proud that, in addition to staying well ahead of all other Russian news media on Facebook, we have surpassed many of our international competitors,” said RT’s editor in chief Margarita Simonyan. “Popularity of RT’s Facebook is a testament to the Arabic-speaking audience’s great interest in the news that come out of the Middle East, as well as to Russia’s point of view on the events in the region.”

RT Arabic is ahead of leading international news broadcasters on Facebook, amassing almost four times as many likes as CNN Arabic. It is also ahead of France 24 Arabic (one-and-a-half times) and Deutsche Welle Arabic (seven times), according to Facebook’s own measurements.

Facebook’s “People Talking About This” metric, which shows the active segment of the total audience, has exceeded 200,000 users for RT Arabic – or more than 10 percent of RT Arabic’s subscriber base. For example, for Al Jazeera, that ratio is 4 percent. This means that a large proportion of RT Arabic fans do not simply read the news, but comment on the stories, debate with other followers, and share posts with their friends.

According to Socialbakers media analytics service, RT Arabic was the fastest growing Russian media organization in the past month, adding 300,000 subscribers in January alone and more than a million subscribers over the last six months. Egypt, Iraq and Syria are the top three countries with the greatest number of RT Arabic subscriptions.

RT is an international news network that broadcasts 24/7 in English, Arabic and Spanish from its studios in Moscow and Washington, DC, and is available to 644 million viewers worldwide. RT is the first TV news channel in history to cross the one billion views mark on YouTube. It is the winner of the Monte Carlo TV Festival Awards for best 24-hr broadcast, and the only Russian TV channel to garner two nominations for the prestigious International Emmy Award for news reporting.