Internet Usage Outside Jakarta Soars High

Earlier today, Yahoo! Indonesia invited bloggers and journalists for a status update about their activities and how they plan to be involved in increasing Internet exposure to Indonesians. Yahoo! Country Lead Pontus Sonnerstedt and the face of Koprol, Satya Witoelar as well as several members of the core Koprol team were on hand to present their plans and answer questions from the audience.

Yahoo!’s research with TNS found that Internet usage in Indonesia has shifted from dedicated cafes to mobile and home connections thanks to much more affordable data packages from mobile carriers as well as home broadband operators.

Their data shows a 19 percent drop in Internet cafe usage while mobile access grew 26 percent and home access up nine percent. Less significant reductions are also evident in offices, schools, and wifi hotspots. This shows that Indonesian internet use is becoming highly personal and highly mobile.

Internet usage is still highest in the capital city but growth is largest in what Yahoo! calls tier two cities. In tier one cities, growth is 35 percent between 2009 and 2010, while in tier two cities it is 63 percent. Tier one cities are Jabodetabek, Surabaya, Medan and Bandung, while tier two are Semarang, Makassar, and Palembang.

In Indonesia Yahoo! reaches 76.9 percent of the Internet population and is currently number one in email, instant messaging, sports, and entertainment. The World Cup provided Yahoo! with significant traffic and the recently launched Yahoo! OMG helped Yahoo! greatly in the entertainment area.

In two months since being acquired by Yahoo!, Koprol has had more registered users, more places and has now developed a Java mobile app. While reluctant to share numbers, Satya revealed that the number of users overall has doubled but activities have actually tripled in the Jakarta area. Perhaps surprisingly outside of Jakarta there’s a five hundred percent increase in usage since Yahoo! acquired the former startup.

By implementing Yahoo! Geo, Koprol is confident about growing internationally at least in terms of adding locations to their database. To help maintain an accurate location listing, Koprol has introduced Kurators, a select group of users who are tasked with verifying venue submissions. This is aimed at keeping Koprol venues clean from duplicates.

A marketing campaign due to commence shortly is being aimed at increasing exposure of Koprol to Indonesians and to raise the number of registered users. In addition, they are launching a Java mobile app tomorrow to make it more practical for people to use Koprol. While the mobile website is certainly usable, an application will provide more functionality and easier access to the service.