About Mako

Mako

Mako is a Hebrew-language news and entertainment portal based in Tel Aviv, owned and operated by Keshet Media Group, Israel's leading commercial television company. Launched in 2008 as Keshet's new-media arm, Mako brings together video on demand from Keshet's television programmes, Channel 12 news content and a wide range of written coverage — news, entertainment, sports, music, television, food, comedy, home and family, digital, lifestyle and relationships. It has been described by its owner as one of Israel's top three most-visited websites and the country's leading mobile site in its early assessments, and it serves as the digital home of the Keshet 12 television brand.

Origins within Keshet

Keshet, whose name means "rainbow" in Hebrew, was founded in 1993 and made its broadcast debut on 5 November that year, sharing airtime with Reshet on Israel's Channel 2. Over the following decade and a half it built the programmes that defined Israeli commercial television, including the satire Eretz Nehederet, launched in 2003, and the Israeli version of Big Brother, launched in 2008. In that same year, 2008, Keshet launched Mako as its new-media arm. Industry histories of Israeli media record the timing precisely: Channel 2's franchisee Keshet launched mako.co.il in 2008, while its rival Reshet experimented with other arrangements before launching its own site. Mako was therefore born as the online extension of a television franchise at the moment when broadcasters worldwide were deciding that their future audiences would be reached through their own websites as much as through the television schedule.

What Mako publishes

Mako's defining feature is the combination of video and text in one portal. It offers video-on-demand content from Keshet shows, from Channel 2 news programmes in its earlier years, from Bip, the comedy channel, and from Music 24, the Israeli music channel. Keshet also runs Netex New Media, a Hebrew-language website directory, and those properties were integrated under the Mako portal. Alongside video, Mako provides written content covering news, entertainment, sports, music, television, food and comedy, together with sections described by the company as Home and Family, Digital, Spirit, and Women and Men. It also hosted user-created content in a section called Haambatia. The editorial centre of gravity is entertainment and television — recaps, clips, interviews and coverage built around Keshet programmes — with news supplied through the group's news operation, a balance that distinguishes Mako from newspaper-born portals such as Ynet and Walla.

Relationship to Keshet 12 and Channel 2

For most of Mako's first decade, its television parent broadcast as one of two franchisees on Channel 2. In November 2017, under Israel's licensing reform, Channel 2 closed and Keshet Broadcasting was rebranded and relaunched as Keshet 12, a channel broadcasting around the clock in its own right, described by the group as Israel's most-watched commercial television channel. Mako carried that transition online, remaining the portal through which Keshet 12 programmes are promoted, clipped, streamed and discussed. The news programmes seen on Keshet 12 are produced by the Israeli News Company, wholly owned by Keshet, and their digital presence developed in close association with Mako before the dedicated N12 site was launched in 2020. Mako thus sits between two brands: it is Keshet's entertainment and general portal, while N12 is the specialised news destination of the same group.

Technology role: 12+ and streaming

Mako's team also plays a technology role inside the Keshet group. The group's BVOD streaming service 12+ — offering live Keshet 12 broadcasting, catch-up viewing and a large video-on-demand catalogue including series such as Married at First Sight, Rising Star, Ninja Israel, Master Chef and Dancing with the Stars — was developed and designed by Mako's technological team, according to the service's own store descriptions. That detail matters for understanding Mako's position: it is not only a content brand but the group's digital product organisation, responsible for the platforms through which Keshet television is watched online. Keshet's own company profiles list its digital portfolio together — Mako as its independent entertainment portal and one of Israel's top three most-visited websites, N12 as the news company's app and website, tech12 as a technology-industry news hub, and 12+ as the streaming service — with Mako as the oldest and broadest of the four.

Scale and market position

At the time of Keshet's twentieth anniversary in 2013, Mako was described as third among the most-viewed Israeli websites and first in mobile. A decade later, Keshet Media Group profiles continued to describe Mako as one of Israel's top three most-visited websites, and Similarweb-based reporting on Israeli traffic in 2025 and 2026 continued to place Mako among the country's leading sites, behind global platforms and Ynet. In a market where the leading news site is a newspaper group's portal, Mako's persistence near the top of the traffic table as a broadcaster's portal is significant: it shows that television-originated digital brands could hold audience share against both newspaper portals and global social platforms.

Programmes and content culture

Mako's content culture is shaped by the Keshet programme slate. The group is responsible for formats and series that travelled internationally — Prisoners of War (Hatufim), launched in 2010 and adapted by Showtime as Homeland with Keshet as executive producer; Rising Star; and When Heroes Fly — as well as domestic fixtures such as Eretz Nehederet and Master Chef. Mako's entertainment coverage, video extras and programme pages are built around that slate, giving viewers a place to watch episodes and clips, follow contestants and presenters, and read coverage between broadcasts. Its comedy and music content draws on the Bip and Music 24 properties integrated into the portal. For Israeli audiences, using Mako is often less like reading a newspaper website and more like entering the extended universe of the country's most popular television channel.

Audience

Mako's audience is the Hebrew-speaking Israeli public, skewing naturally toward viewers of Keshet 12 entertainment and reality programming, alongside general readers arriving for news, sport, food and lifestyle content. Because the portal is free and built for habitual mobile use, it functions as an everyday destination rather than an occasional one. Its user-created content experiment, Haambatia, and its breadth of lifestyle sections reflect a portal strategy aimed at time spent and return visits, in competition with both news portals and social media feeds.

Ownership and organisation

Mako is owned and operated by Keshet Media Group, a private Israeli media company headquartered in Tel Aviv, led since 2002 by chief executive Avi Nir. Keshet Media Group's divisions include Keshet International, the global production and distribution arm established in 2012, Keshet Broadcasting and Mako itself, which is listed among the group's divisions. The parent company employed about 500 people in recent listings. Within that structure Mako is the consumer-facing digital flagship: the website and apps through which most Israelis most often touch the Keshet brand outside the television screen itself.

Significance in Israeli digital media

Mako's significance is that it proved the broadcaster-portal model in Israel. Launched in 2008 as a new-media arm, it combined on-demand television, news and magazine-style writing in Hebrew under one brand, survived the abolition of Channel 2 and the birth of Keshet 12, spun out a dedicated news sibling in N12, and supplied the technology team behind the group's 12+ streaming service. Based in Tel Aviv and publishing at mako.co.il, it remains one of Israel's most-visited websites and the digital centre of the country's leading commercial television group.

Mako's development also tracks the wider economics of Israeli television online. A franchise broadcaster that once reached viewers only on its allotted Channel 2 days now reaches them continuously: live through 12+, on demand through Mako's video library, and in text throughout the day. The portal's written sections — food, family, digital and lifestyle coverage among them — keep that relationship warm between programmes, so that the audience for a reality final or a drama premiere has been assembled on Mako long before the broadcast begins. That continuous audience, rather than any single programme page, is the asset the portal was built to create.