He’s building a digital media goliath in Malaysia

Tze Khay Voon, managing director of Rev Asia. Photo credit: Publicity.

The Rev Asia media group is arguably one of Malaysia’s top digital media conglomerates. With 12 sites, it targets the Malay, Chinese, and English-speaking audiences, covering news as well as niche topics, from Malaysia’s electronic dance music scene to how to make the best nasi goreng.

In September, the sites had over 4.7 million unique monthly visitors, a figure that’s undoubtedly gone up after it acquired three more local content portals in December.

Leading the charge for Rev Asia is its managing director, Tze Khay Voon. He’s been associated with the media arm of Catcha Group for over 10 years, with roles across sales, advertising, and strategy.

“I started my career in the late 1990s,” recalls Tze. “For the first two years, I sold advertising space in magazines. I joined Catcha Berhard during the early internet days back in 2000 as an online sales executive.”

Like most of his peers, Tze was sold on the prospect of a digital future. Patrick Grove’s Catcha was working aggressively to position itself as the Yahoo for Southeast Asia, and many considered it a hot prospect for an IPO. But the dot-com bubble in Silicon Valley hit hard and those plans were shelved.

Print is the new web

Photo credit: kaboompics.

Grove, now with a net worth of US$260 million, is credited with rescuing Catcha from the dot-com crash. Its media wing had to make big changes to be salvaged, pivoting to traditional publishing in order to stay afloat.

In 2002, Tze helped launch Juice, a magazine on urban culture in Malaysia. Catcha didn’t stop there – the next five to six years were spent rolling out more original magazines coupled with licensing deals to bring foreign publications to Malaysia.

“At the back of our heads we always wanted to come back to online businesses as we knew that would be the future,” explains Tze.

We knew we had to own and operate our own brands.

The first hints of this switch back to the web came in 2009 when Catcha was in talks with Microsoft to act as its exclusive sales partner and help build MSN Malaysia.

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