By Siobhan O’Leary

Over the past 18 months, foreign language instructional material publisher Pons has been testing out a new business model for their online dictionary. So far, the results have been positive. Faced with competition from other online language dictionaries like LEO, Pons has turned to advertisers to help finance www.pons.eu.

In addition, the site will incorporate more Web 2.0 elements and add several new languages — Greek, Portuguese and Turkish. In an interview with buchreport, Pons Managing Director Gabriele Schmidt pointed out that pons.eu received 46 million page views in January 2010 (compared to 17 million at the start of 2009), though the site still has a way to go before it catches up with LEO, which had 320 million views in January 2010 alone. Pons would like to double its number of page views by the end of this year but expects that its change in strategy will really pay off within five years.