ThaiVisa Founder Interview

Bangkok Dan at Absolutely Bangkok interviews the founder of ThaiVisa, Thailand's most popular online forum. George gets thrown some hardball questions, but responds well to the common criticism that his moderators are more Catholic than the Pope.

He’s an institution: George, founder and owner of Thaivisa.com, Thailand’s probably most popular website among foreigners with its unique forum. George is the brain behind the success, but success invites envy and jealousy, so not all you read about Thaivisa is milk and honey. I recently had a talk with George and here is what he says about Thailand today, Thaivisa’s sometimes debatable moderators, politics, etc.

George say, how did it all start with Thaivisa?

It was an accident! It started with an experiment with SEO (search engine optimization) in 2002, I wanted to see if a forum like this would be able to reach the top of search results without any cheating (it’s called “white-hat SEO”). As we only had myself and a few friends in the very beginning, we started to ask each other questions and answered each others topics. Most forums actually start this way, even if it does sound a little strange. At that time there were not many Thai related forums around and mostly they covered the bar scene, and we weren’t interested in that and wanted to offer something completely different. I invested a lot of baht in marketing the site during the first three to four years.

Thaivisa has some dream stats. Share some of the Google Analytics data.

We have around 35-45,000 unique visistors per day, and we are approaching 6 million page views per month. We grow approx 10-15% per month, but some months are more or less due to seasonal variations and how much we spend on marketing. Around 50% of our traffic is from within Thailand. Most of our revenue is reinvested in server infrastructure and online marketing.

You seem to be constantly online. You’re hooked! Can you ever take a day off from your site?

Well, I do try to take days off, but yes, I am hopelessly addicted. However, we have a great team on Thaivisa and I know that it’s in good hands. My normal working day is between 12 and 16 hours per day, a bit less on weekends or when traveling. I went to China for a week recently and had severe withdrawal symptoms. smile.gif I have promised myself to “get a life” soon though.