How a blog for Indonesian millennials became a media company with 50 million readers

IDN Times, a website dubbed “Indonesia’s BuzzFeed,” started out as a side project back in 2014.

“I don’t like being idle, so I was looking for something to do after work,” says Winston Utomo, then an employee at Google’s Singapore office. “So, I started a blog and gave it a bit of a ‘cool’ name: Indonesia Times.”

But the blog found traction among Indonesian youth, whose options at the time were mainly print magazines like Hai or Gadis (and their web properties), which still operated like legacy media organizations. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed was steadily building a massive audience in the English-speaking world, but a local equivalent didn’t yet exist.

(L-R) IDN Media founders Winston and William Utomo / Photo credit: IDN Media

Fast forward five years: that blog has rebranded into IDN Times, and has spawned three other sister sites.

Targeting Indonesian millennials and Generation Z, IDN Times and its sister sites collectively receive almost 50 million unique visitors a month. Utomo is now the CEO of IDN Media, the company that owns those media properties, along with three other companies that handle the business side.

“Even when I started taking it seriously,” he says, referring to the time he quit his day job, “I never thought we would get this far.”

Expanding into new verticals

IDN Times, bearing the tagline “The voice of millennials and Gen Z,” continues to be IDN Media’s flagship website. The site attracts 38.5 million unique visitors per month, and it publishes both in-house reporting (on general interest topics ranging from politics to lifestyle) and content contributed by 90,000 community writers all over Indonesia.

A community-oriented media approach seems popular in Indonesia – Kumparan, a news website started by ex-Detik staffers, also publishes a mix of in-house reporting and community contributions – and Utomo says it helps them scale.

“Our community is key to IDN Times, because you cannot hire 500 people to write 500 articles,” he says. “How can you [employ] the same number of people but with 10 times more content?”

The IDN Times homepage

The comparisons to BuzzFeed come not just because of a shared audience demographic, but also because of IDN Times’ listicle-and-quiz content.

“From the start, 95% of our content – aside from hard news and investigative pieces – had to be listicles,” Utomo says. “Why? We target millennials and Generation Z. They spend most of their time on Facebook and Instagram newsfeeds, which is [basically] a listicle format.”

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