Sanook.com
Thai website
Sanook.com (Thai: สนุก.คอม) is a Thai-language web portal and news website based in Thailand. It is among the country's most visited websites and one of the longest in operation, having been launched in 1998. The website is operated by Tencent (Thailand) Co., Ltd., previously known as Mweb (Thailand) from 1998 to 2007, and Sanook Online until 2016, when it was renamed to reflect its acquisition by China-based parent Tencent.
History
Sanook.com was founded in 1998 by Thai internet entrepreneur Poramate Minsiri. Back then, the Thai World Wide Web was still in its infancy, and Sanook, which started as a web directory, developed into the country's first major web portal and quickly became one of its top visited sites. Poramate experimented and added features according to social trends; one example was its collection of suggestions for cute and funny pager messages. The site's name, from the Thai word meaning "fun", as well as its original logo (stylized as SANOOK!), were inspired by Yahoo!'s.
In May 1999, Sanook was acquired by South Africa–based Naspers—which was creating a portfolio of global web properties as was the trend during the dot-com boom—through its subsidiary MIH, for an undisclosed sum, speculated to be in the range of multiple tens of millions of baht. Sanook.com, along with several other Thai web properties, became part of the Mweb (Thailand) Company, headed by Craig White. Mweb also launched another web portal, Mweb.co.th, with the aim of developing it as an international brand serving the region—at the expense of Sanook, a move contested by Poramate.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Sanook.com” is thai website. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Sanook, Thai and website, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q13021988. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2007, 2016 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sanook.com” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.