Hosam El Sokkari
Head of Audience
Yahoo! Middle East
As Head of Audience at Yahoo! Middle East, Hosam El Sokkari works with various Yahoo! teams to build a stronger and richer content portfolio, merging users’ experience across numerous platforms and developing a stronger tie between media and community channels. He is a media professional with extensive experience in both traditional and new media (TV, radio and online) at an international level. Hosam is a well-known TV presenter and moderator who has been honored as one of the 20 individuals shaping the region’s digital-media, broadcast and telecommunications industries by Digital Broadcast Magazine. On several occasions, he has also made it onto Arabian Business’s list of the “World’s Most Influential Arabs”.
Advancing Yahoo!’s position as one of the leading portals for digital media in the Middle East, Hosam has helped secure a number of major content deals since joining the Yahoo! team in the spring of 2010. Under Hosam’s leadership, the Yahoo! Middle East portfolio has grown to include distinguished brands such as BBC, Reuters, Al Jazeera and Rotana.
Hosam has been instrumental in launching many of Yahoo!’s flagship projects in the Middle East, including the Yahoo! Maktoob homepage in both English and Arabic. Such activities also include the roll out of the OMG! celebrity news site catered specifically to the Arab world, and the revamp of the popular Helwa women’s portal.
Hosam joined Yahoo! Middle East after 15 years of work at the BBC where he became the only Arab to take the position of Head of BBC Arabic since the service began in 1938. Hosam also played a major role in the expansion of the company, going from being a radio channel to an integrated multi-platform operation offering radio, online, digital services and a television news channel running on a 24-hour basis. Furthermore, Hosam has been credited with creating media offers that included user-generated content as an integral part of BBC Arabic programming. His show “Noqtat Hewar” has developed over the years into a multimedia interactive offer and became a model that was adopted in other parts of the BBC.
His last task before joining Yahoo! was to develop and launch a special media execution that combined TV programming with a strong social media experience. According to the BBC Global News Director, Peter Horrocks, the “710Greenwich” project’s success paved the way for a new genre of programming with its innovative approach.
In 1996, Hosam also joined Al Jazeera as a member of its launch team, where he established and presented one of the channel’s flagship programs and helped build the brand to the international success that it is today.
Hosam was educated inCairo,BerlinandLondon. He holds a degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences and an MSc in Information Systems from the London School of Economics.