1 - Holy crap, there are a lot of stations

The Arab World has 250-some satellite channels. It has more than 30 music broadcasting channels alone. In fact, nobody really even can keep track of how many channels there are, and there are more opening every month. More than anything else, it resembles the dot-com boom - everyone knows there's far too much out there, everyone knows it's not sustainable, but everyone thinks they're the special ones who will ride the coming bad times out and emerge as survivors, holding a key spot in a 300-million-strong market. Some of the channels are ridiculously specialized: there are at least two real-estate channels I know of, and probably more to come.

I also suspect there's an element of apparent solidity to the TV business that attracts naive oil-rich investors. The proclivity of Gulf investors for real estate - after all, if you've bought a building, you actually own something physical that you can look at and walk around in - is pretty well-known. A TV station has similar appeal - once you've paid for it and it's up and running, you can go home, turn on your TV set, and goddamn if it isn't your TV station out there, broadcasting to the world.

As an aside: the 30+ music stations thing is maybe not quite as irrational as it looks on its face. Music stations get a LOT of money from accepting SMSes, and can fill the same ecological niche as internet chat rooms for families who would never DREAM of letting their teenage kids have access to the corrupting evils of the Internet. Given the lack of solid information on ratings (see below), a strong SMS money stream is nothing to scoff at.

2 - Nobody knows anything

As I mentioned above, nobody really even knows how many stations there are, or what they're all really broadcasting. Ratings are determined, not by an independent ratings service, but by individual stations doing their own research, generally through quarterly phone polls of viewers. Naturally, each station's numbers end up portraying them as leaders in the market, or at least in their niche. Even supposedly neutral services (eg. IPSOS-Stat in Lebanon) have been bitterly disputed. In 2005, Future TV sued IPSOS-Stat, claiming that their Lebanon sample was heavily slanted in a Maronite/Christian direction.

There are attempts underway to get a decent people-metering service going in Saudi, but it's about a year away from producing anything, and doesn't even have a solid plan (at least not a public one) yet for how it's going to work.

Further, since every broadcasting company is privately held, nobody really knows who is making money, what they're making their money from, or even if anyone at all is currently making a profit in the market. It's not usually even clear who exactly owns what.

3 - Everyone wants to broadcast to a pan-Arab audience

And that means that everyone wants to broadcast to Saudi Arabia, which is by far the biggest & richest segment of the market. That, in turn, has a definite knock-on effect on media freedoms. No station that's trying to be a commercial success is going to risk pissing the Saudis off too much. Maybe once there's some decent ratings services in different countries, people will start trying to target different regions, but for now it's just as cheap to broadcast to the whole Middle East, so why not?