Jakarta (dpa) – Despite being rock bottom when it comes to Indonesia’s staggering political and economic problems, Jakarta has no shortage of trendy bars, restaurants and nightclubs that attract young, upwardly mobile trendsetters.
This city of 10 million also has no shortage of Internet cafes, which attract customers ranging from college students to civil servants to business people wanting to surf the web and send e-mail.
Put the two together, and cast a net into a country-wide population of 210 million people, and you have the potential for a huge online market hungry for fashion, cyber gossip, entertainment and news. Or so a few adventurous Internet companies hope.
Indonesian-language lifestyle portals have hit the country with a bang, prompting more companies to consider getting into the business and budding online news websites to expand their formats.
The country’s leading lifestyle portal is Astaga.com, which gets nearly 1 million page viewings a day. The portal offers “what’s hot and what’s not2, mixed in with music, news, entertainment and a live chat room.
It earned its rank through an aggressive promotions campaign to make Astaga.com a household name – In English, the website means “Oh My Gosh!” – especially among young middle and upper-class Indonesians.
“We’re young, fresh and trendy,” said one of the company’s Indonesian executives. “What we are is those new Volkswagens – What we are not is a Jaguar.”
What they also are is plastered on billboards and public buses across Jakarta, encouraging 20-somethings like Winda, who works at an Internet cafe inside Jakarta’s largest McDonald’s restaurant, to log on.
“I check out romance, jobs, housing,” she said, adding that most of her customers do the same.
Marketing toward Generation X means that advertisers ranging from Nike to Nokia are jumping on the bandwagon.
Indonesia lags far behind its neighbours such as Singapore and Thailand in Internet users – Less than 5 per cent of Indonesians log on – but that number is expected to balloon as it becomes more available across this sprawling archipelago of 17,000 islands.
That means competition among lifestyle portals will be fierce, and the battle has already begun in earnest.
The new challenger is Kemana.com (What’s Up?), which boasts a different design to Astaga.com, but also has sections on romance, lifestyles and entertainment, as well as horoscopes.
“The Internet user here tends to be under 30,” said James Castle, whose investment consultancy firm helped set up Kemana.com a few months ago. “They’re urban kids, well-educated, trend-setters.”
Castle said only around 2 million people in Jakarta fit this category, and many of them only log on at work or in Internet cafes because they do not own home computers.
However, he said his company was not fazed.
“A lot of the people who are online now don’t have a lot of money,” Castle said. “But if they are online, they are eventually going to have the good jobs.”
He said the number of Internet users in Indonesia would grow exponentially as the industry expands, which creates an urgency among portals such as Kemana.com to find ways to attract them.
Tiny Singapore, he said, has more than 3 million Internet users, “but that’s all they’ll ever have.”
Indonesian web surfers are not limited to local portals, though, especially if they have even rudimentary English language skills.
Yudi, 30, who like many Indonesians uses only one name, said he prefers to log on to the U.S.-based Yahoo.com to get news, e-mail access and information about studying abroad.
“It’s normal if others want to log on to follow fashion or trends,” he shrugged. “That’s the residual impact of the Internet.”
