MoMo Founder quoted in Economist- Eat, pray, tweet

MoMo Founder quoted in Economist- Eat, pray, tweet

WHAT does the most populous Muslim nation do in its spare time? Increasingly, it swaps gossip online. Indonesia is now the world’s second-largest market for Facebook and the third-largest for Twitter, according to several web research firms. For industry insiders, however, the most exciting statistic is not how many Indonesians use social media, but how many still don’t. Of 230m or so Indonesians, fewer than 20% are connected to the internet.

Foreign firms see untapped potential. Facebook doesn’t even have an office in Indonesia, yet it has grown like crazy, to 30m users. In May last year Yahoo! ventured into this fizzing market by buying Koprol, a location-based social network. Indonesian culture seems particularly receptive to online socialising. People love publicity, don’t fret much about privacy and gleefully follow trends. “Everything is about friends and location,” says Andy Zain, the founder of MobileMonday Indonesia, a networking forum.

The biggest question for everyone is how to make money from Indonesians’ interest in connecting with one another. Michael Smith, who led Yahoo!’s acquisition of Koprol, says the payoff will take time: “I always tell people that the volumes and willingness of customers to pay in Indonesia [are] so low that you can’t expect gargantuan revenues from it today.”

Western firms are only just beginning to grasp the eccentricities of the Indonesian social-media market. Thanks to years of price wars between Indonesia’s three major telecommunications companies, mobile contracts in the country are dirt-cheap. For Indonesians living in North America, it is often cheaper to buy an Indonesian SIM card and roam with it than it is to sign up for a local plan. Read full article via The Economist.