"The first-quarter performance is much better than our expectation," said Torboon Puangmaha, chief executive of WEB (Thailand) Ltd, which runs the site.

The unit of Netherlands' MIH Group has not disclosed its financial figures.

The Sanook site's hits rose from 4.8 million in 2004 to 6.9 million last year, while the number of pages viewed doubled from 763 million to 1.54 billion.

According to a recent survey by Truehits.net, run by the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre, sanook.com received up to 220,000 visits per day, marking an all-time high in the country's history.

MWEB beefed up its workforce from 100 to 160 people last year while it added products and services to the web portal, including a search, a blog, an album, an auction, Web television, and something called Sanook! QQ.

About 70 per cent of Sanook.com's revenues came from advertisements and the rest from wireless product development such as logo and ringtone downloads. Since it has just recently started, e-commerce's contribution is still little. Torboon said the Internet was taking off in Thailand and that advertisers would begin to shift to online media.

"We have seen the signal which is broadband. Two years ago there were only tens of thousands of users and today Now there are more than 600,000 broadband subscribers. With broadband, people will spend more time online and that means they will consume less traditional media.

"Some the Bt80 billion ad spending will shift from offline to online media," he said.

Sanook.com this year would try to educate potential advertisers on the benefits of online advertising.

Pichaya Changsorn

The Nation