About Walla!

Walla!

Walla!, rebranded in 2024 simply as Walla, is a Hebrew-language Israeli web portal and news website headquartered in Tel Aviv. Founded in 1995, it is one of Israel's first internet portals and one of its most popular websites, providing news alongside search, email and other portal services at walla.co.il. Its news outlet, known from April 2015 to February 2021 as Walla! NEWS and afterwards as Walla News before the 2024 rebrand, is one of the major Israeli news websites. Since the end of 2020, Walla! Communications Ltd has been fully owned by The Jerusalem Post group, controlled by Eli Azur; before that it belonged to the Bezeq telecommunications group.

Founding as an internet guide

Walla! was founded in 1995 by Erez Pilosof and Gadi Hadar. It began not as a newsroom but as a guide to internet sites — a directory for Hebrew users at a time when the web was small enough to be catalogued and search was not yet dominated by global engines. The name itself comes from the Arabic interjection wallah, used in everyday Israeli speech to mean "Really?!" — a colloquial, informal brand well suited to a consumer portal. That origin explains Walla!'s enduring shape: where newspaper websites grew out of newsrooms, Walla! grew out of a directory and added news to a broader bundle of consumer services.

Public listing and the IOL merger

By 1998, the company had gone public on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. In 2001 it merged with IOL, Israel Online, a similar portal run by the Haaretz Group, which had launched IOL as early as 1995. The merger consolidated two of Israel's pioneering portals into one. For about a decade the Haaretz Group partnered with Bezeq International in managing Walla!, a partnership that ended in 2010. During the portal's first decade, most news stories appearing on Walla! came from the Haaretz Group, news agencies and other content providers rather than from Walla!'s own journalists. The site was, in that period, primarily a distribution and aggregation platform with enormous reach, sitting alongside Ynet at the top of the Israeli web.

Building an independent newsroom

In 2006, Walla! began building an independent news and editorial staff producing original news stories and special features, rather than relying mainly on supplied content. That decision converted Walla! from a portal that carried news into a news publisher in its own right, competing directly with Ynet and later with broadcaster-backed sites such as Mako and N12. In addition to news, Walla! produces original content in fields such as sports, cinema, music, fashion and food. The wider portal continues to offer services beyond journalism, including a search function powered by Google Search, email, online shops, chats and video on demand, and it has at times sold consumer services such as fibre internet in collaboration with Hot. Registration for the portal is optional, and the company has reported 2.5 million active users; Alexa rankings in January 2022 placed it among the top nine sites by traffic originating in Israel.

The Bezeq years

Bezeq, Israel's dominant telecommunications company, progressively consolidated its ownership of Walla!. In April 2012 Bezeq acquired full ownership of Walla! Communications, by then described as Israel's leading internet portal with more than 2.5 million monthly unique users, and Walla! remained a Bezeq subsidiary through the following decade. Those years included episodes that drew national attention. On 28 January 2018, the website crashed under an unusual load of users following the publication of a recording of Sara Netanyahu. Walla! also featured, under its former ownership structure, in the wider Israeli public debate about relations between media owners and political leaders during the Bezeq-related investigations of that period, in which indictments were filed against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and against Bezeq's controlling shareholder Shaul Elovitch and his wife. For a directory of what happened to the portal itself, the ownership record is the essential fact: a telecom-owned portal at the centre of Israel's internet market.

Sale to the Jerusalem Post group

Bezeq put Walla! up for sale and, after a long process in which its asking price fell and other broadcasters considered bids, businessman Eli Azur, owner of The Jerusalem Post and Maariv, emerged as the buyer. Bezeq reported to the stock exchange in September and December 2020 that it had agreed to sell all its holdings in Walla! Communications, and on 27 December 2020 the sale was completed following regulatory approvals; from that date Walla! was no longer a Bezeq subsidiary. At the end of 2020 the transfer of ownership to The Jerusalem Post, controlled by Eli Azur, was approved, and the acquisition also included a merger of activity between Walla! and Maariv within the group. Walla! Communications is accordingly listed today as a subsidiary fully owned, at 100 percent, by The Jerusalem Post, headquartered in Tel Aviv, with Avraham Gabai as chairman and Ido Eshed as chief executive in recent company listings.

Walla Plus and video expansion

Under its new ownership, Walla! expanded its video offering. In 2022 it launched Walla Plus, an application presenting the video content already available on the site as a television-style channel. To the site's own video were added programmes produced by other media arms of the Eli Azur group, such as Radio 103 and Charlton's sports programmes, together with newly produced content. The channel was distributed on over-the-top services and broadcasting platforms as well as on the Walla website and applications. The move reflects the same convergence visible across Israeli media: a text portal adding a linear-feeling video channel, and a newspaper group using one digital brand to distribute content from its radio and sports properties.

The 2024 rebrand

In April 2024 a rebranding of the Walla website began, including a farewell to the exclamation mark that had accompanied the brand for some 30 years. The news outlet had already passed through several names — Walla! NEWS from April 2015 to February 2021, then Walla! — and the 2024 change simplified the master brand to Walla. Dropping punctuation may sound cosmetic, but for a portal founded in 1995 the exclamation mark was a piece of first-generation internet branding, and its removal marked a deliberate modernisation of one of Israel's oldest web identities.

Services and audience

Walla!'s audience is the Hebrew-speaking Israeli public at large. Its proposition combines habit-forming portal services — email, search, shopping and video — with a general news service covering Israeli and world news around the clock, plus original sports, cinema, music, fashion and food content. That combination historically made Walla! one of the most visited sites in the country and a direct rival to Ynet for the position of Israel's default homepage. Even as social platforms and broadcaster apps have fragmented attention, Walla remains counted among the country's major news websites.

Place in Israeli internet history

Walla! is a survivor from the first age of the Israeli web. Founded in 1995 as a directory, listed on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange by 1998, enlarged by the 2001 merger with Haaretz's IOL, professionalised as a newsroom from 2006, wholly owned by Bezeq from 2012 and sold to the Jerusalem Post group at the end of 2020, it has passed through every ownership model Israeli digital media has tried: independent start-up, newspaper partnership, telecom subsidiary and newspaper-group flagship. Headquartered in Tel Aviv and publishing in Hebrew at walla.co.il, it remains one of the major Israeli news websites and the clearest example of the portal model in Israeli journalism.

Walla's longevity also makes it a useful measure of how Israeli reading habits changed. A service founded to help users find other websites became, successively, a stock-exchange-listed portal, a newspaper group's partner, a telecommunications subsidiary with its own newsroom, and finally the digital flagship of a newspaper group that also owns print dailies and radio stations. Each stage left a layer in the product: the directory became portal services, the portal services acquired original journalism, and the journalism acquired a video channel. Few Israeli websites carry so much of the country's internet history in a single brand.