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I believe we need an alternative to adsense, paypal and amazon in lebanon.

I was working for a lebanese web hosting and development company in lebanon 2 years ago, i was a php developer and i discussed this idea with the owner, he was very interested but never took any real steps to start that kind of projects. I left the company now, i am posting a thread about it because rahmu told me to post a thread about it a while ago and because i see that Nabs is so interested in creating an online store. Oh i just read AymanFarhat thread, another guy suffering from this issue

We all know it is so hard to get adsense to work in lebanon, lebgeeks is a proof, few will tell me that they actually can get adsense on their sites, that's good for you, but i never knew anyone who have adsense on his site.

It is important to solve this problem, if you can't make money from your sites, there's no need to create websites.
Well if you can create an alternative, then you can create an amazon alternative, much like google adsense, google shopping and google checkout.

i talked to xterm about it, i told him in theory this could be done but is there any online advertisers that might be interested in posting ads online? and he said it's hard to find lebanese advertisers, i need to target the MENA region, well i know many indian people and i know i could target the MENA region, india and those poor countries which needs paypal like pakistan which has many brilliant programmers living without paypal. But if we want to target these region we need to ask for bigger budget.

Someone needs to take actions, lets focus on lebanon first and then we can expend, creating an adsense alternative is easy if we can find the advetisors, i know that's hard so you don't need to tell me that, i created musicvile.fm with my friend, 10 000 daily visitors, we can't get adsense money and we can't convince anyone to advertise the site.

creating a paypal and amazon alternative is hard, i spent many days thinking about it. And I'm not talking about the programming part.

If you want to create a paypal alternative you have to go and talk to the lebanese banks and convince them to cooperate.

if we want to create an amazon alternative we need to worry about the delivery part. This issue could be solved if we really want to start the project.
Respectable companies allow you to pay using your MasterCard or visa card directly. I never ever trust an online company that asks me to pay with money transfer (paypal).
We all know it is so hard to get adsense to work in lebanon, lebgeeks is a proof
For what it's worth, LebGeeks has no ads by choice and not by limitations. If we wanted, we could make it work easily. Samer decided not to put ads on his website, and I think that's by far the best decision he's taken.
forgive me for not being able to reply asap coz my internet connection is still so bad :)

@hussam i don't blame you for not trusting paypal and i'm not gonna try to change your mind, many lebanese don't even pay money online maybe because they're not used to. Well but if we have a paypal alternative we could change that (i remember about 5 years ago i was like 16 years old and i went to byblos bank, i wanted to have a web surfer master card to buy domain names and pay for hosting and the staff there say that they wont let me coz they thought i play poker online i had to explain a lot of things to them.)

@rahmu well i didn't that, maybe you're right, since this site is moderated by the members then it doesn't need ads.

Anyway we have to find a way to create adsense alternative for the lebanese programmers. maybe paypal isn't as important, nor is amazon, but adsense is vital. (And I don't think it should be a ppc system, i have written a long paper explaining why ppc is bad and i really believe that in the next 5 years adsense will face a big problem, i'm not gonna go too deep into that subject now)


as samer told me, I'm gonna present this project, along with the video sharing project to those investors he told me about, but if you believe in this project then lets try to do something together about it, i don't know what, all i know is that it's a huge huge project for one man alone