Mashable’s global strategy chief talks Australian expansion, Asia, branded content and how they predict viral content

News site for the ‘connected generation’ Mashable launched in Australia late last year, and has announced a push into Asia. Alex Hayes sat down with Adam Ostrow, Mashable’s chief strategy officer, to see how those plans will play out, and how it will beef up in Australia.

You said at SXSW that Mashable was going to launch in Asia by the end of this year – what is that operation going to look like and why Asia?

Mashable already has a fairly large audience in SE Asia – Singapore, Malaysia Indonesia and The Philippines we have close to 2m unique visitors per month already there.

It’s not dissimilar to Australia where we had a similar audience, we’ll be looking at localisation in terms of content as well as localisation on the sales side. We haven’t decided whether to hire our own sales team or  work with a partner. Definitely the first half of this year we’ll look to have things started in Singapore.