Executive Summary
Google commissioned independent consultancy Public First to explore how Google products helped people, businesses, and workers in the UAE throughout 2021.
In this report, we explore how Google products (Search, Maps, Android, YouTube and Cloud) help people in the UAE keep up to date with the latest news and information, discover new local businesses, learn new skills, find jobs and get more done at work.
Google supports economic growth and digital transformation in the UAE
While the unprecedented impact of Covid-19 has made 2020 and 2021 a difficult period for everyone, it has also helped accelerate some other wider trends: the rise in e-commerce, a shift towards remote working and the use of digital to support lifelong learning. Google products played an important role in this transformation.
Helping People
Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. In the UAE, this includes everything from helping a child with their homework, picking up a new recipe or DIY skill, making it easier to find new things to try, or just saving time. In our polling, we found little difference in usage of Google Search among different genders, ages, levels of education or income.
In the last two years, Google products helped people keep up to date with changing Government guidance around the pandemic, stay connected with friends and family, and reduce the disruption to education and schooling.
Helping Businesses
While the UAE has one of the world’s highest levels of internet penetration, until recently e-commerce prevalence has lagged behind. RedSeer Management Consulting Firm estimates that e-commerce penetration more than doubled in the UAE from 5.6% to 12.1% between 2019 and 2021.
As people spent more time online and at home, businesses adapted too - 35% of businesses in the UAE started advertising online for the first time. Additionally, 76% of people in the UAE say that they regularly use Google Search to research a big purchase.
At the same time, platforms like AdSense, Google Play Store, Android and YouTube have made it easy for anyone to follow their passion, reach a worldwide audience and become a professional creator or developer, supporting tens of thousands of jobs across the UAE.
Helping Workers
Google Search is now one of the most important places workers turn to when looking to find a new job. Once they are at work, they increasingly turn to Google Search to help keep their skills up to date.
At the same time, Google productivity tools such as Workspace are also essential for keeping workers and companies productive, whether they are working in the office or increasingly remotely. Almost two-thirds (64%) of business leaders say that even when the pandemic recedes they think that they are likely to continue to make use of hybrid working.
Introduction
Over the last decade, the levels of internet penetration in the UAE have grown from roughly two thirds of the population in 2010 to 99% now being able to access the internet. As a key gateway to the internet for many people, Google has played an important role in unlocking the power of the internet - and this was particularly important during the last two years.1
For this report, Google commissioned independent consultancy Public First to explore how Google products helped the UAE’s workers, businesses, content creators and families throughout 2021.
In total, Public First estimates that Google helped support an estimated 11.3 billion AED (range 7.3 - 17.4 billion) in economic activity in the UAE in 2021.
In this report, we explore Google’s impact in the UAE:
- For people, Google products made it easier to keep up to date with changing Government guidance, stay connected with friends and family, and reduce the disruption to education and schooling.
- For businesses, Google helped support a rapid acceleration in e-commerce, as part of the wider growth of online retail across the Middle East and North Africa.
- For workers, Google apps helped keep them productive during a rapid shift to remote working, while helping many others find new jobs and build their skills.
Helping People
The Value of Information
Google’s mission is to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
For people in the UAE, that means:
- Saving time. In total, by making it easier to find information, we estimate Google Search saves the equivalent of an extra free day of time per person, per year. That’s enough time to read 1,000 pages, run five marathons or even drive from Abu Dhabi to Dubai twenty times.
- Staying informed. 74% of internet users in the UAE say that they used Google Search in the last week to keep up with the news.
- Finding entertainment. 83% of internet users in the UAE say they used YouTube in the last week to look for entertainment.
- Making purchase decisions. In the UAE, 56% of consumers start their online shopping journeys using search engines2 and 20% of consumers watch online videos when researching products and services vs. 7% in the UK.3
- Making it easier to try out new things or businesses. 71% of surveyed internet users in the UAE say they used Google Maps to find a local business, and 77% to find something new to try.
By offering many of its products free to users, Google makes it possible for everyone, no matter their background, to benefit from the power of digital search and online information. In our polling, we found little difference in usage of Google Search for those of different genders, ages, levels of education or income.
Business Profile
Business Profile is a service that allows business owners to manage the way their business appears on Search and Maps at no cost. With Business Profile, businesses can connect with customers, post updates, list products and services, accept online orders, and more.
In 2018, Google and the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry announced the launch of “Get Dubai Businesses Online”, a program dedicated to help local businesses get more easily discovered on the web, by listing and verifying their business information (company’s opening hours, contact number and location) on Google Search and Maps. New and existing members of the Dubai Chamber received assistance in getting their business listing by visiting the website. Businesses were able to instantly convert their business listing into a free mobile-friendly website in English and in Arabic. Across the UAE, tens of thousands of Arabic and English websites were created through Business Profile.
In 2021, Google Search was an important platform through which people in the UAE kept up to date with official Covid-19 public health information:
Supporting Learning
For children and families, Google Search and YouTube helped keep learning going even when schools weren’t open:
At university, Google products helped students learn. 59% of students say that they use Google Search multiple times a day as part of their study or job.
YouTube Kids
YouTube Kids is a standalone video streaming service designed for parents and families with children under 13. YouTube Kids provides a family friendly environment by offering a range of parental controls and space for children to learn. YouTube has collaborated with a range of Arabic content creators in the region, such as El Schoola (educational channel covering Arabic, Science, Math, and more topics) and Iftah Ya Simsim (the Arabic co-production of Sesame Street), to provide more high quality Arabic content for families.
YouTube Kids offers a wide range of parental controls to allow parents to customise their child's viewing experience in the way that suits them.
Helping Businesses
Helping businesses find and reach customers
The internet makes it possible for companies of any size to reach the most relevant audience, wherever they may be in the world.
The UAE has long had a mature consumer internet market, with high levels of broadband and mobile connectivity and has amongst the highest smartphone penetration on the globe. However, until recently, this has not been matched by equivalent levels of take-up in e-commerce. According to a report published by Google and Bain & Company in 2019, 63% of surveyed internet users reported shopping online, with an average of just three-four purchases per internet user. By contrast, in the UK 89% of internet users purchased online, with an average of 18 purchases.4
In recent years however, the pandemic looks to have accelerated the UAE’s transition to e-commerce dramatically, driving both people and businesses online. 73% of people in the UAE report shopping more online since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the first five months of 2020 are reported to have seen a 300% increase in demand for e-commerce services.5 RedSeer Management Consulting Firm estimates that e-commerce penetration in the UAE more than doubled from 5.6% to 12.1% between 2019 and 2021.6
Lamsa World
Lamsa World is an Arabic education platform for children between the ages of 2 and 8. It has interactive courses in Math, Science, language arts and more. Badr, the founder of Lamsa, noticed his young children were spending a lot of time consuming non-Arabic content on their devices. He built the Lamsa World application to encourage more Arabic-speaking children to read and learn in Arabic. Badr took part in the ‘Google for Startups Accelerator: MENA’ program and with the help of mentors from Google, he tested different sign-up options which led to an increase in the sign-up rate from 20 to 35% and a 300% increase in content downloads.
Mindtales
Launched in 2020, Mindtales is an online app that helps diagnose, monitor and manage mental health, which we've seen more global awareness about than ever before. The founder, Viktorija, experienced a stressful period two years ago. She couldn’t find affordable and accessible professional help. She decided to build an app offering mental wellness services for the region. Viktorija and her Co-Founder Ahmed Al Mousa took part in the third cohort of ‘Google for Startups Accelerator in MENA’ program to improve their app's user experience and overall awareness. In three months, they were able to get over 14,000 conversions per month through Google Ads. They also increased their user engagement by 14% through using sentiment analysis through Google Cloud AI models.
Google Shopping
Google Shopping is a service by Google that makes it easy for users on Search to research purchases, find information about different products, their features and prices, and then connect with sellers to make their purchase. Google Shopping helps enable the acceleration of the ecommerce industry in the UAE. Businesses can create Shopping campaigns to promote their online and local inventory, boost traffic to their website or local store, and find better qualified leads.
With Covid-19 forcing many businesses to shut their physical premises, for the first time, thousands of businesses moved online.7 Google Search and Google Ads played an important role in this surge:
Grow My Store
Retailers are a cornerstone of our societies, and one of the major contributors to driving economic recovery in the MENA region and the world as a whole. That's why Google launched the Grow My Store tool in Arabic and English last year, to support retailers in the MENA region. This free tool helps local businesses improve the shopping experience on their websites, attract more customers, enhance their online experience and make it easier for customers to make purchases.
Supporting Entrepreneurs on YouTube and Android
The internet has made it possible for everyone to be a creator. In the past, the biggest barrier to independent creators was often distribution: finding a way to let other people enjoy their writing, music, film, or art — and ideally, pay for it. Today, tools like AdSense, YouTube and the Play Store have allowed teams of any size to distribute content and earn revenue across the world. This has enabled a long tail of diverse content, fuelling new formats from serialised web fiction to vlogging.
Today, YouTube has a worldwide audience of over two billion users, with over one billion hours of content watched every day8 and over 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute.9 The top five UAE based YouTube channels, by subscriber count, have over 53 billion views.10 This immense audience supports thousands of independent creators. In the UAE, the percentage of YouTube channels making six figures or more in revenue (AED) is up over 40%, year over year and there has been a 30% increase, year over year, in the number of channels that exceed 1M subscribers.
YouTube creators based in the UAE include Chef Shaheen, a food content creator and Azza Zarour a lifestyle vlogger, who uses the platform to reach a global audience.
For developers, Android provides access to over 2 billion monthly active users across 190 countries worldwide, with over 2.9 million apps available to download from the Play Store.11 Developers receive 70% of any income they earn through the Google Play Store, and in addition to direct revenue many other developers also receive a significant income from contract work developing apps for businesses and brands.
In 2020, people in the UAE downloaded 500 million mobile apps across Google Play and the Apple App Store.12 Public First estimates that the Android Developer Ecosystem is supporting at least 50,000 jobs in the UAE,13 with around a third of these core software and app development jobs. Additionally, the number of developers in the UAE making $10,000 or more per month has grown by more than 16% in the last 12 months.
Chef Shaheen
Chef Shaheen is a popular YouTube Chef based here in the UAE, specializing in Iraqi food with a modern twist. He started his channel on YouTube in 2017, competed in Masterchef UK, and now has over 251 million views on hundreds of videos. During the pandemic, he decided to share his recipes with his fans in real life and achieve his lifelong dream of opening his own restaurant, YABA. Yaba recently opened in Jumeirah and means ‘my friend’ in the Iraqi dialect. This is one of many examples of talented content creators who started on YouTube and moved to big successes on the platform and off.
Supporting News Publishers
Search and News help drive traffic to local news sites. Google pays out billions of dollars every year directly to the publishing partners in its ad network. In terms of traffic, Google drives 24 billion clicks per month (9,000 clicks per second) from Google Search and Google News results to publishers’ websites globally.
Google has a team dedicated to helping news publishers in MENA maximise their revenue and monetization on Google's ad tech solutions, as well as offering tools like News Consumer Insights to help publishers better understand their reader preferences and journey.
In the last three years, Google trained 15,000 journalists, media professionals and students on Google News Lab curriculum including data journalism, fact checking, visual data journalism and YouTube content strategy. Trainings were held in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia and Algeria.
Google News Initiative Innovation Challenge
- In 2018, Google announced the first GNI Innovation Challenge in MENA, an open-call for project funding to publishers and newsrooms focusing on reader engagement and new reader revenue.
- In the last two rounds of the GNI Innovations Challenges, Google selected 19 projects from eight countries (UAE, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Morocco, Syria and Tunisia) and awarded a total of 1.8M USD.
The recipients in the UAE included news organisations like The National in the UAE as well as news startups like the Scientific Arab, Arageek (Motivate Publishing) and Popular Science Arabia (Haykal Media publishing).
Helping Workers
Finding jobs and building skills
Today, when people need to find a new job, Google Search is often the first place they turn:
Google products can be particularly important for underrepresented and vulnerable groups. Based on our polling, Public First estimates that every month:
- On average 1.8 million women in the UAE use Google Search to look for a new job every month.
- 84,000 unemployed people in the UAE use Google Search to help prepare for a job interview.
Maharat min Google
To address the growing skills gap in the MENA region’s workforce, and to help ensure that opportunities created by technology are available to everyone, Google launched Maharat min Google in 2018, an upskilling program in Arabic to help people get ready for future job opportunities, advance their careers, or grow their businesses. Maharat min Google provides free courses, tools and in-person digital skills training to students, educators, job seekers and businesses. The online platform in Arabic includes over 100 lessons and tutorial videos covering a range of digital marketing courses including search engine marketing, understanding consumer insights, fundamentals of machine learning, basics of code, and more.
Since the program’s launch in 2018, 1.5 million individuals have been trained in digital skills and the majority of the individuals trained are based in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, United Arab Emirates, Algeria and Iraq.
Helping Workers Collaborate Online
With much of the physical economy shuttered throughout 2021, an increasing number of businesses were forced to shift online:
Online tools such as Search, Maps, and Google Workspace are increasingly important for a wide range of jobs — helping people in the UAE work better.
Before the pandemic, 17% of people in the UAE told us that not having access to a search engine at work would cause a few issues and mean a few tasks would take longer, today, 63% of online businesses in the UAE that Google products like Workspace were essential or important to their business in enabling remote working.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace (formerly known as G Suite) is a package of cloud-based services that can provide a company or school with a whole new way to work together online—not just using email and chat, but over video conferences, social media, real-time document collaborations, and more.
Google Workspace plans provide a custom email for businesses and include collaboration tools like Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, Sites, and more.
Methodology
To build a broader picture of the benefits, we conducted extensive public polling to ask people and businesses how they made use of Google products, and what difference they made to their leisure, work and society:
- Working with panel provider Dynata we polled 1,000 adults across the UAE to get a representative sample. In this poll we asked 70 questions about their experience using Google and other online products.
- Working with MSI we polled 500 senior business managers in small, medium and large businesses across the UAE, asking them 50 questions about how Google and online tools are supporting their businesses.
Public First is a member of the Market Research Society. The full tables for all the data used in this report is available to download from our website.
While Google commissioned this report from Public First, all economic estimates are derived from official, third party sources and Public First’s proprietary information.
Business Benefits
Google Ads
Following the precedent of past Google impact reports, we use third-party data to estimate the total size of each country’s Google Ads market.
For our higher end estimate, we estimate the size of the Google Ads market based on:
- A top-down estimate based on Google’s published numbers for revenue by region (US, EMEA, APAC), apportioned out by UAE’s share of the regional e-commerce market.
- A bottom-up estimate combining estimates of the average number of Google Search ads seen, with third-party data on average Cost Per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rates (CTR) drawn from AdStage and WordStream.
For our lower end estimate, we estimate the size of the Google Ads market based on:
- A top-down estimate, based on PWC Global Entertainment & Media Outlook data on paid search market, and Statcounter data on Google’s share of the search market
- A bottom-up estimate combining estimates of the average number of Google Search ads seen, with third-party data on average Cost Per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rates (CTR) drawn from AdStage and WordStream.
This lower end estimate is equivalent to the methodology used in our previous 2019 impact report for UAE.
Following the methodology of the US Google Economic Impact Report, we then scale this revenue by an assumed Return on Investment (ROI) factor of 8, from:
- Varian (2009) estimates that businesses make on average $2 for every $1 they spend on Google Ads.
- Jansen and Spink (2009) estimate that businesses receive 5 clicks on their search results for every 1 click on their ads.
- Google estimates that search clicks are about 70% as valuable as ad clicks.
- Total ROI is then 2 * spend + 70% * 5 * 2 * spend – spend = 8 (spend).
This growth is similarly scaled by the ROI factor of 8 and divided by GDP.
More information on this methodology is available at https://economicimpact.google.com/methodology/
Our central estimate is the geometrical mean of our higher and lower end estimates.
We estimate the share of this value created by new online sales by the proportion of estimated spend from companies who say that they used Google Ads for the first time as a result of Covid-19.
Similarly, we estimate the share of this value supporting small businesses by the proportion of estimated Google Ads’ spend from companies who have less than 250 employees.
Android Developer Ecosystem Jobs
To find the estimated total number of Android jobs in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt we used the geometric mean of three estimates:
- Adjusting DAXX’s estimate of the total number of Android jobs in USA by the ratio between that country’s population and the population of the USA
- Adjusting DAXX’s estimate of the total number of Android jobs by the ratio between that country's GDP and the GDP of the USA.
- Apportioning worldwide Android job numbers by an estimate of each country’s share of total global downloads or revenue, based on the methodology below.
For UAE and Saudi Arabia, we used AppBrain data, choosing the US, UK and German markets as representative markets and counted the number of times the developer of an App on the ‘top grossing’ or ‘most installs’ list for a given country is mentioned. This was repeated for the ‘top developer’ list. The average ranking was then found across the markets and a simple power law was applied to the rankings to estimate the market share of a given country (i.e. the revenue coming to an app developer does not decrease linearly with its average app ranking such that the developers of the best ranking apps account for significantly more market share than those below it).
We then combined these estimated shares with DAXX’s estimate of total worldwide 2020 app economy job numbers of 14 million (DAXX) and PPI’s estimate of the average percentage of app economy development jobs that are in Android.
- https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-145/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/mena-e-commerce-series-opportunity-beyond-hype/
- https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-145/future-of-marketing/digital-transformation/mena-e-commerce-series-opportunity-beyond-hype/
- https://www.bain.com/insights/ecommerce-in-MENA-opportunity-beyond-the-hype/
- https://gulfbusiness.com/how-e-commerce-in-the-gcc-has-taken-flight/
- RedSeer Primary Research and Analysis, August 2021
- Extrapolating from our business polling
- https://www.statista.com/topics/2019/youtube/#topicHeader__wrapper
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/259477/hours-of-video-uploaded-to-youtube-every-minute/
- https://socialblade.com/youtube/top/country/eg/mostsubscribed
- https://www.statista.com/statistics/266210/number-of-available-applications-in-the-google-play-store/
- The State of Mobile 2021, App Annie
- Public First modeling. A full methodology is given in the appendix.