Online Media of the Year: Search No. 4 SPH Asiaone

Category: Search site

Owned by: Singapore Press Holdings

Editor: Irene Ngoo

Web manager: Dexter Teoh     

Asiaone's popularity has grown from strength-to-strength since its launch in 1995, drawing over 100 million page views a month from six million unique IP addresses held primarily of professionals, managers, executives and businessmen. Asiaone came up 4^th, 2^nd and 5^th place overall in the search site, business site and IT news site category respectively - a strong testimony of its popularity with web users locally.

Besides allowing users to access news and infotainment from local leading publisher Singapore Press Holdings' (SPH's) stable of publications, Asiaone also caters to its users business and lifestyle needs. A wide variety of interest sites which include finance, motoring, technology, health and lifestyle issues are made available to its users. The strength that Asiaone possesses over the other sites might just be its ability to integrate online advertising with the many other platforms that local media giant SPH owns and produces in an attractive bundle to its advertisers.

Asiaone seems to have struck a chord with local respondents who gave it more votes than foreign respondents did - the majority of Singaporean respondents ranked Asiaone 1^st while most foreign respondents ranked it 3^rd. The same relationship was established over at the business site category, where majority of respondents from the abovementioned categories ranked Asiaone 1^st  as well. 

More client-side respondents voted for Asiaone than did agency-side respondents - 48 respondents from the former group voted for Asiaone, in contrast to 35 from the latter. Agency-side respondents did not show clear preference for Asiaone at any one rank in the search site category as the number of votes were distributed quite evenly at 13, 11 and 11 votes for 1^st , 2^nd and 3^rd place respectively. However, clients-side respondents tended to vote for Asiaone at 1^st placing.

By job function, Asiaone as a search site was most preferred by respondents on the agency-side performing account servicing and media buying functions, and respondents on the client-side performing marketing and communication/public relations/event managing functions.