Animating text along a path on surface of sphere

Create a comp that is twice as wide as it is high that has the same vertical dimension as your main comp. Add a text layer to the vertical middle of the comp if you want your text to line up with the equator of the sphere you will create. Name this comp "Animated Text" and drop it in your main comp, then apply CC Sphere to the Animated text layer and you have text wrapping around a sphere. You can choose to only have the front part of the sphere visible of the text layer is the only one in the nested comp. 

Now all you have to do is animate the rotation of the sphere. If you want additional animation for your text layer then all you have to do is animate the text in the nested comp. This is what you end up with if you also apply CC Sphere to a world map, make the bottom copy of the sphere smaller than the top copy and only show the Outside of the sphere, duplicate the text comp, move it below the Earth Comp and set it to render only the inside, set the Earth comp as a track matte for the bottom text layer and then turn on the earth visibility. This took about 5 minutes. The rotation properties are tied together with simple pickwhip expressions so you only have to animate the rotation of the one text layer to move them both. It looks something like this when I set up a viewer for the text and earth comps:

There are a couple of other ways to do this. The most efficient way to put text on a sphere depends entirely on your design goals and animation requirements.

Use the pre-installed Text Animation Preset called "3D Rotate around a Circle". The preset applies a Mask Path as well as two keyframes. After applying the preset, adjust the size of the Mask Path and the keyframe values to suit your exacting needs.