Access to arabic.rt.com, the site of Rusiya Al-Yaum, RT’s Arabic channel, has been restricted in Libya. As a result, online traffic coming from Libya has dropped by 98%.
“We are addressing the situation in the most urgent manner possible. We have sent inquiries to all government agencies in Libya to find out the reasons why the site is being blocked. RT is doing everything it can to restore full accessibility to what is one of the main news resources in the country and the region,” said Margarita Simonyan (left), RT’s editor in chief.
In December 2012 Rusiya Al-Yaum’s website was ranked in the top three online TV channels in the Arab world by Forbes Middle East. The site, arabic.rt.com, recorded more than 50 million visitors in a year and the highest new visit rate amongst the top three channels. Forbes used data from Google Analytics in its rankings.
Rusiya Al-Yaum is an award-winning news channel that began broadcasting from Moscow in 2007. As of December 2013, Rusiya Al-Yaum, alongside all of RT’s other channels, has been available in the HD format. The channel is available to more than 350 million viewers across Middle East, North Africa and Europe. According to a Nielsen study, more than 5 million people watch Rusiya Al-Yaum in Syrian, Lebanon, Kuwait, UAE, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia*.
RT is a global international news network that broadcasts in English, Arabic and Spanish from its studios in Moscow and Washington, DC, and is available to 630 million viewers worldwide. Pew Research Center’s 2012 study named RT, whose YouTube channel has passed 940 million views, as the largest provider of news video footage on the world’s largest video sharing platform. RT is the only Russian TV channel to garner two nominations for the prestigious Emmy International Award.
*Monthly audience