Key Point 2: Indonesia is the Capital of Friendster, peaking at around 2...

Indonesia is the Capital of Friendster, peaking at around 2 million unique visitors a day (the Philippines came in 2nd at 1 Million uniques followed by Malaysia at around 700k.).

[ The Internet ]

Indonesia: Next big internet crowd?

Abe Olandres January 25, 2009 · 2 min read

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Aside from China and India, Indonesia is looking to be the next big source of internet users in Asia. With only 10% internet penetration (25M users), there’s still much room for growth from its 238 million population {via IWS}.

Google Trends shows us some relevant data that show strong adaptation in Indonesia’s internet population.

No. 7 most users on Twitter. No. 1 users of Plurk with about 30k uniques active out of the 31,367 registered. As a comparison, there are 63,554 registered Plurk users from the Philippines but only around 10k are active according to Google trends.
Indonesia is the Capital of Friendster, peaking at around 2 million unique visitors a day (the Philippines came in 2nd at 1 Million uniques followed by Malaysia at around 700k.).
Indonesia came in at #10 for eBay.com traffic (the only other Asian country along with India at #7), and also at #5 with Amazon.com
Yahoo is also popular in Indonesia, peaking at about 4 million uniques on weekdays and at #4 worldwide, after the US, India and China.

Of the estimated 25 million internet users, only about 2 million have direct access to ISPs (majority of which are still on dial-up). What’s more promising would be the use of 3G internet from the almost 80 million mobile users in Indonesia.

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Abe Olandres

Editor-in-chief

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

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18 Comments

Hemant Patel · 17 years ago

I m not amazed now…Indonesians r among the top migsters ,,they use mig33-a java chatting software to communicate with each-other extensively…

Internet users in the India n China r growing in numbers very rapidly too….
India has already established itself as a one of IT powers with its best programmers…

Jugster · 17 years ago

Poor broadband infrastructure in Indonesia shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are geographically, politically and economically challenged.

If you look a the map, they are sprawled over a large archipelago. Waters that divide the islands are wide and deep. And since microwave breaks over bodies of water, radio is not an option. Population centers are also spread out and divided by rough terrain. Most ISP rely on VSAT. This is an expensive pipe with really poor latency. And as if that was not bad enough, between December to March, monsoon rains water down their satellite signal.

Politically, they haven’t done well either. As a result, business is difficult to prosper unless equity yields to powers that be. Red tape and corruption can easily cripple a business.

Economically, things aren’t so great either. While the country’s population is one of the highest, 43% of the jobs are in agriculture. Wealth is therefore unevenly distributed. If you’ve managed to visit Jakarta, you would see a few Jaguars, BMWs and Benz’ here and there. But most will be on two or three-wheeled taxis. The working class dines in roadside eateries that would make our JolliJeep look classy.

paul · 17 years ago

very unrealiable statistics.

JC John SESE-Cuneta · 17 years ago

Indonesia came in at #10 for eBay.com traffic (the only other Asian country along with India at #7), and also at #5 with Amazon.com

Wow. I wonder, where do we rank for eBay.com and Amazon.com? Probably lower?

Lito | TheFilipinoEntrepreneur.Com · 17 years ago

This is an interesting topic.

sky · 17 years ago

What’s dial up???

Seriously, people still use that?!

And by “2 million have direct access to ISPs” does that mean the other 23 million only go to computer shops for internet access?

CarloBlogg · 17 years ago

yeah, i never thought that dial up are still used today (although Im not that surprised, haha :D) Indonesia may be the next potential internet market :D

Angelo Panares · 17 years ago

I thought the Philippines had a very big problem with over population, it seems 238 million Thais also are in a squeeze :)

Who would have thought dial-up was still being used, and I thought we were behind.

This made my night, I’ll check-out Thailand on the net tonight.

Semidoppel · 17 years ago

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