When it comes to global TV events, few if any beat the football-soccer World Cup. Some 3.75bn people were said to have watched the 2018 event in Russia, and FIFA has been talking up the possibility of 5bn people tuning into this year’s event in some form. Those figures, of course, should be taken with a hefty pinch of salt, but there’s no doubt that a huge number of eyeballs have been turned on the newly-created stadia of Qatar. But the World Cup isn’t the first global TV phenomenon to come out of the tiny, gas-rich gulf state.
News channel Al Jazeera was launched in Doha 1996 with a loan of US$137m from the Emir of Qatar. The use of a loan, rather than direct funding, was designed to convey at least the impression of independence, and it was pitched as closer to the BBC than more the closely-controlled state-funded broadcasters. Its recruitment of many former BBC journalists was seen as a sign that it was going to take that mission seriously.
The channel’s rise in the Arab world was rapid, becoming the most watched pan-Arab news channel, but Al Jazeera took on a wider global significance with the launch of its English service in 2006.
With its main broadcast hubs in Doha and London, Al Jazeera English pitched itself as an equally professional alternative to the likes of the BBC and CNN. It picked up big name western presenters, including the late Sir David Frost and former BBC World Affairs Correspondent Rageh Omaar.
Al Jazeera English became – and has remained – one of the few globally successful 24-hour news channels, claiming to be distributed to more than 300m households worldwide, putting it behind only BBC News (with more than 450m) and CNN on 475m.
But the broader organisation has made some missteps. A US-focused version, Al Jazeera America, was launched in 2013 through the acquisition of Current TV for around $500m, which provided access to 48m households. However, viewing figures remained stubbornly low, and it closed in 2016. A channel focused on Turkey launched digitally in 2013, but shut before it began broadcasting on TV. A Balkans version, launched in 2011, is however, still broadcasting.
Al Jazeera’s approach to online has been more effective: for a while, it was seen as a digital pioneer, particularly with its AJ+ online-only operation which was a leader in the industry’s broader move to social-friendly short-form video. Two years after launching in 2014, AJ+ claimed to have achieved more than 5bn impressions across all formats, though of course, those numbers (like FIFA’s own) probably require some seasoning.
These days, Al Jazeera’s online activity gets less attention and, though it’s clearly still a force, it remains behind its main English-language news competitors. The channel’s following on YouTube tells a similar story to its standing in international TV distribution, with 9.1m subscribers to its English channel and 11.2m for the Arabic version, compared to 13.6m for the BBC and 14.5m for CNN. It’s slightly further behind on Facebook, with almost 17m followers for the main English channel and 11.5m for AJ+ – compared with the BBC’s 58m and CNN’s almost 40m.
The main Al Jazeera site, however, is something of a laggard. SimilarWeb data puts AlJazeera.com just outside the analytics service’s top 100 sites in the news category, while the BBC and CNN are among the top 10.
It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, difficult to find any firm financials for Al Jazeera. That first loan from the Emir was meant to last for five years, but the government has continued to fund the channel and its expansion. According to reports in 2013, about $1bn was spent on setting up Al Jazeera English, with $100m a year to keep it running. Shortly after it closed Al Jazeera America, the company announced it was cutting 500 jobs worldwide, suggesting it isn’t entirely immune to economic reality.
The question remains of just how independent Al Jazeera is from the Qatar government that funds it. The channel has certainly been allowed to raise issues critical of Qatar, even around the tightly-controlled PR exercise that is the World Cup, with stories about concerns over human rights and the abuse of migrant labourers that have echoed those of the critical foreign media. In that sense Al Jazeera’s approach is certainly different to the state-controlled propaganda from the likes of Russia’s RT and China’s CGTN.
It is, however, far more critical of the country’s rivals in the Middle East, and has faced controversy over its coverage of upheaval and conflicts in Egypt, Bahrain, Iraq and especially Syria. Some was an echo of the criticism it faced down when it carried video messages from Osama Bin Laden and was accused by its neighbours of funding terrorist groups. That murky history has now been superceeded by global brand-building.
The 26-year-old Al Jazeera’s success as a BBC-like instrument of soft power relies on treading this fine line and its ability to do so is what has made it the only English language news channel to compete on a global scale with those from the US and UK. On those terms, the broadcaster – described by the Qatar government as “a private foundation for public benefit” – may be a pretty good investment for a country whose brand-building has included an estimated $200bn spent on the World Cup. Al Jazeera has made it.
