As in print media, just because a n

As in print media, just because a news organization can create an audience, does not mean they can automatically monetize it. Facebook is not yet a revenue platform in Burma, nor are local media websites. Google, a prime source of ad revenue for publishers, is unavailable to them. That will change in time, but the groundwork should be laid now. Currently, advertisers who place online ads get poor results due to the lack of search engine optimizable content, the content of the ads themselves and how they are structured and overall low internet penetration. There is an underlying reason that makes internet advertising difficult: Burma and North Korea are the only two countries in the world that lack a common Unicode language. Thus, their content cannot be reliably searched. Because of this, while access to the internet is growing in urban areas, there are difficulties for businesses, whether media or other organizations, to operate profitable websites. Up to this point and due to the economic sanctions, there has been no Burmese search engine at Google: there is no Google. com. Baidu, the Chinese search engine, is also absent and does not index the Burmese web. Yet it is apparent Google is crawling all these websites. Google is indexing the Burmese web in the background; but at this point, it has not yet “opened the search engine.” If one types in a Burmese headline into the English search engine, Burmese results are returned (although there are many flaws with the results). Bottom line, it’s hard to drive search engine traffic when it’s not searchable. And if there is no Google or other major search engine, there are limited ways for Burmese businesses to make money from their sites. The implication for local Burmese media is that in the near term, the way to develop local audiences on a locally-produced website would be through cross-promotion using the company’s core media platform. If they wish to generate revenue from their sites, they must look both domestically and internationally, and produce content in languages (English, Thai) that can
be searched.