Asia Online – the world’s most significant literacy project (and internet investment opportunity)

Asia also has 60% of the world’s population, and Emarketer forecasts internet penetration to this sizeable chunk of humanity will have a compound annual growth rate of 11.4% through 2012. By 2012, Emarketer predicts Asia will have 818 million internet users – almost double the number of European users and more than three time the USA and Canada combined.

The reward for Asia Online’s efforts will undoubtedly come in the form of a significant share of the advertising revenues expected in the region when the population goes online, much as it has done in the mature European and American marketplaces over the last decade.

“Advertising in South East Asia is young and the market is growing rapidly”, says Wiggins. “There has not been a lot of advertising in this market because there has not been a lot of quality content.”

“The market is currently forecast to grow to US$11.5 billion by 2012 with most of that money going to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean markets. We intend to change that. When we provide high quality content, we believe a good chunk of that money plus significant new advertising funds can go to South East Asia.”

First Thailand, then Asia

Using its unique machine translation technologies, Asia Online intends to provide the content so sorely needed. Launched earlier this month (September 3,2008) the Asia Online Thai Portal is the first in a series of portals planned for the entire Asian region. On September 2, there were just 3 million pages in the Thai language on the internet - less than 0.01% of total internet pages. Asia Online has begun to progressively roll out its public portal and in the next few months will double the amount of Thai language content available online.

Most of the pages in local Thai language on the internet are meagre quality, dominated by low value content and there is poor support for Thai in existing search engines. Perhaps even more importantly, the Thai population is far more comfortable using their local language on the Internet than English.

The country’s fast growing economy has a rising middle class, prepared to increasingly use sophisticated services online and the lack of a quality translation tool between English and Thai exacerbates matters even more.

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