The entrepreneurs behind not one, but two popular Indonesian news sites

Sometime between 2015 to 2016, the Indonesian media industry was abuzz with talk of how print had entered its “twilight” phase, thanks to the upheaval caused by the digital revolution.

But a group of senior staffers at Detik, one of Indonesia’s earliest and biggest online news portals, thought that the real problems lay elsewhere: in online media, to be exact. In particular, social media has led to the proliferation of clickbait headlines and an excessive focus on pageviews, among other issues.

Kumparan CEO Hugo Diba / Photo credit: Kumparan

“You can create ‘controversial’ content that leads to extraordinary traffic from 10 minutes of work, compared to an investigative article by a 10-person team that took two weeks,” says Hugo Diba, then a business director at Detik. “We realized that this was an opportunity to redefine how an online media company operates.”

The group founded Kumparan in January 2017, with Diba taking on the CEO mantle. It has since amassed 30 million monthly active users across its website and app, through its relatively different approach from competitors.

“It’s no longer relevant to measure content quality in terms of pageviews,” contends Diba. “We realized that there were two pillars to this strategy: excellence in journalism and excellence in technology.”

Building a hybrid model

Kumparan’s founding team reads like a who’s who of Detik – members include co-founders Budiono Darsono and Abdul Rahman as well as the former CEO, editor-in-chief, and chief technology officer. Diba and another Kumparan co-founder also had stints at CNN Indonesia.

So why create a new company from the ground up instead of just making changes at Detik?

“We tried to be more realistic. It’s easier to build a foundation in an empty lot versus a sturdy, existing building,” explains Diba. Kumparan’s founding team also saw that what needed to change was “not just the journalistic approach, but also culture and how we work.”

As such, the company operates via a distinctive hybrid model: it employs full-time journalists to produce its own editorial content while also acting as a Medium-like platform for user-generated content. Currently, there are more than 5,000 external content creators that publish alongside the 200-plus journalists employed by Kumparan.

At first glance, a notable feature of Kumparan’s website is its relatively uncluttered design. This is a rarity among Indonesian news sites, which tend to cram every inch of their real estate with content or advertising. Unlike several others, Kumparan also doesn’t split an article into multiple pages – a strategy often used in Indonesia to game a website’s number of pageviews.

In a nod towards its young-skewing readership (Diba says its audience makeup isn’t that much different from Indonesia’s overall demographics), a “Trending” button – complete with a BuzzFeed-like arrow squiggle – is prominently displayed near the top.

Kumparan’s homepage

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