DS Dramas

It’s been an interesting week. Most interestingly, Aulia wanted me to take the post down. The Twitter Drama post was deemed irrelevant and confusing. I mustered some effort to explain why I posted it there – primarily because it was Part II to a series of (mostly planned) posts on how to make sense of the Indonesian internet scene. I ended up promising him to write more often. Maybe I will.

I chose Twitter as a general illustration of a new medium – widely popular and recognizable to most – even if they don’t monetize yet. Or Detik.com – Maximum Reach with Tabloid Quality – except this one monetize.

The case studies confuse a whole lot of people and they saw many, many, many internet shops in Indonesia faltered and died because the ad money never comes.

Well, you can’t sit around and expect people come to give you money. Not in any business model, or any market. You have to work to make money and you have to work hard, but I will not write another post to state the obvious.

I would simply offer you another perspective: online advertising is peanuts.

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Twitter Dramas

Twitter is so full of dramas. I have not been paying much attention to the details but I was aware of it. I have been once or twice stuck in a conversation with someone entirely about what happened on ‘the timeline’ last night. Not that I am being patronizing or anything but I had other things to do last night and missed it.

Why don’t we talk about the last Republican Presidential Debate on CNN instead – there was a question to the candidates if America should build an electrified fence along the south border with Mexico. Surely, they would’ve learned from thousands of history that the walls would eventually be taken down. But that’s for another day. Game of Thrones anyone? I pay for HBO exactly because so that I don’t have to do much and just flick the remote.

My media consumption pattern change. I used to have twitter on my Blackberry but soon it drained the battery so fast and clogged everything else down, so I removed Twitter and use my Blackberry as it was designed for: a chat device. Twittering was done on the iPad for a while and mostly from the traffic. These days, I’m back to carrying a laptop around (a Macbook Air, my very first Apple computer since the Apple IIc. Yes, iPad is a computer but it doesn’t have a keyboard).

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Making Sense of Indonesian Internet Scene

I was reading SangatPedas the other day and ended up reading up most of the threads on Indonesian internet scene. Some of them are very interesting and this being Sunday and all, I couldn’t resist.

Let’s start with Remco’s beef on Online Advertising this being the least understood part of the Indonesian market/internet ecosystem.

My understanding of his language is that he thinks the Online Ad market is already oversaturated and only allows for opportunities to those with scale (aka. current news status quo, Detik/Viva/etc.):

Well, once you have a critical mass and you’re in the top of the hierarchy the advertising game changes

In fact, I agree to almost everything his said up to and including that sentence. Beyond that, I think he got it completely wrong.

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The Treehouse: Internet Hopes and Hypes

[Editor’s note: The infamous Treespotter has always been an astute and sharp observer of what is going on in Indonesia. Beginning today, The Treehouse at DailySocial will be host to Treespotter’s public thoughts and remarks with regards to technology, enterprise, startups, and the media. As Treespotter is not an employee of DailySocial his views and comments may not necessarily reflect that of DailySocial. Regardless, we are thrilled to have his column. Welcome to The Treehouse.]

There’s an interesting piece from the BBC – on Google’s increased attention on Asia – the shifting gravity as BBC puts it. The article itself didn’t mention Indonesia, it was mostly about China. Google got kicked out of China for doing the right thing. For many foreign players, China is an increasingly competitive market, true on the internet just as it’s true in textile: China now outsource clothes manufacturing to Vietnam. If you think textile was worrying, this is a whole different league.

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