Google, the international online giant is taking the Arab World seriously, by establishing an office in Cairo and participating in the Cairo Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Exhibition in February 2007.

The growing Internet penetration in the Arab world was probably the reason Google finally took notice of our region. Last year, Google introduced Arabic News and prior to that had provided Arabic search services. It seemed that there were long term plans to seize significant shares in this growing market.

Contextual advertising spend worldwide is in the billions, benefiting from a huge growth in online advertising spends in general. But in the Arab region, less that 1% is spent online every year! So, what is the potential that Google sees in the Middle East?

Plenty! Considering that competition already started with couple of Arabic search engines launched recently, both of which have plans for contextual advertising engines to generate revenue.

Introducing new and innovative marketing tools in the Middle East is needed to lift the advertising industry; search engines are competitive mediums in the west as they are offering advertisers cost-effective and content-targeted tools; contextual ads are being displayed based on their relevancy to the content and advertisers are being charged per-click and sometimes per-action (like closure of a sales or acquiring a registration).

The more players, the better. Some will be international heavy-weights, like Google, and others will be large home-grown groups like Araby.com.

Maybe, finally, there will be some serious money in contextual advertising for web publishers and owners in the Arab World. This could be just what we need for the next leap in the region's online advertising expenditures.