By Yvonne Chang
Vice-President & Managing Director
Yahoo! South-East Asia

THE amount of information being generated is outpacing the human race's ability to digest it. For example, about 145 gigabytes (GB) of data exist for each person on earth. Commercial companies worldwide generated about 48 billion GB of data last year. WalMart, the world's largest retailer, has more than one billion GB of customer data on its servers. To put this in perspective, a normal human being can, at best, read two GB of text in an entire lifetime.

'Between 1950 and 1990, data generated in the world's computers doubled every five years,' says a report from IDC (International Data Corp). 'In the 1990s, as PCs began to proliferate, data began doubling every three years. In 2000, as mobile phones caught on, data doubled every two years till 2008. In 2009 with video becoming more prevalent, data is set to double every year till 2012.'

Thus, getting the right and relevant content on demand is itself a big problem. Companies such as Yahoo!, which focus on both search and content, are upping the ante on the tech front. News organisations are increasingly turning to new ways of presenting their content, including through enhanced forms of search. A Pew research study in 2008 found that 83 per cent of people looking for news online use a search engine to find it.

It is therefore not surprising that the top two apps that both consumers and businesses favour on the online PC platform are search and content - compared with voice and messaging on the mobile platform.

'Search and content go together because you need search to find the right content,' says a study by AMI Partners, which focuses on SMBs (commercial companies with up to 999 employees). 'Content is king in the online world because search in itself is meaningless unless it is used to find the relevant content.'

At one time people came to Yahoo! for three key products; Mail, Messenger and News. But today, Yahoo! is becoming a central focal point for both consumers and professionals, be they young users on a celebrity hunt or wanting to socialise with family or friends, or sophisticated audiences who recognise Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! Sports pages as the most authoritative in their respective fields, or people wanting to simply buy or sell a product or service.

For advertisers, this means they can place their messages on premium online experiences that reach and engage with highly defined target audiences. Moreover, capturing consumers when they are online and ready to make a purchase shortens the decision-making cycle. Not everyone understands the science behind search advertising. Yahoo! simplifies the process and connects search to content so that advertisers can take advantage of the tremendous targeting capabilities built into the platform.

Currently, less than 10 per cent of ad spend is allocated to online advertising, Many businesses are losing out on the significant opportunities that exist today to deliver highly targeted messages to the exact people they want to reach. Largely, it's a fear issue and in a world that is changing so rapidly, it is hard for everyone to stay in tune with just what's possible. As a result, they tend to lose out by not trying out and implementing new ideas.

But staying away from the online world will also hurt the revenue potential of most companies, especially SMBs, and even more so in Asia. Between 2005 and 2009, the global Internet population increased from fewer than one billion to more than 1.6 billion; by 2014, it is projected to grow by another 42 per cent. The bulk of the population growth will come from Asia, which will represent 44 per cent of the online population in 2014.

Although online population does not immediately correlate with online spending, businesses need to grasp the changing global online population numbers in order to understand the dynamics of the markets in which they currently operate, and plan for international expansion.

A new paradigm is taking root. It is basically called the 'three screens' approach where consumers are always in front of one or more of these three screens: the computer, the mobile phone, and/or the television set. Common content is increasingly becoming prevalent on all three, more so as the computer doubles up as a TV set, and the cellphone as a computer.

Common content gets pulled - and at times meshed - with the medium. For instance, Yahoo! has a long-standing partnership with Associated Press to provide AP's world-class content. Yahoo! News pulls content from 200 odd global news sources and Yahoo! Finance has 70 content partners and pulls in trusted financial data from multiple data providers.

The goal for business is to target and measure. Targeting comes from using software tools to help advertisers reach the right audience with the right message. And measurement is for marketers to gauge the offline sales impact of their online advertising with programs such as Yahoo!'s Consumer Direct, for example. That's how the game will be played, going forward, and businesses in Asia need to first be aware, and then be ready to play the game and win.

This article was first published in The Business Times.