Indonesia’s content creator platforms poised for sharp growth

Jakarta

AT 16, after finishing high school, Oktorika Mandasari walked the streets of Depok in south Jakarta looking for a job. In an era before online recruitment sites, she depended on job postings in local newspapers and word-of-mouth.

“My parents did not see the importance of girls having an education and I did not want to end up married at 17,” she told The Business Times (BT) during a recent interview over lunch. “I applied (for many openings) but I got lucky and landed my first job at Biznet.”

After attaining a business management degree, she moved through a number of tech startups including Jatis Mobile, Easypay and Rocket Indonesia where she picked up new skills and learned how to run a business. Eventually, in 2020, she started her own agency to help small businesses grow. “Most of these businesses were run by women and we focused on influencers for marketing activities,” she said.

A year later, she met another technopreneur, Jason Lee, who had earlier co-founded co-working outfit Cohive. Together, they set up BintangGO, a firm that links fans to their favourite celebrities and influencers.

The pair may have hit on a fast-growing sector in the digital economy. Indonesia’s creative economy is diverse and covers 16 different sub-sectors. In 2020, according to some estimates, it was worth around US$130 million.

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With 180 million young people in Indonesia ready to join the workforce in 2030, the number of creators is expected to explode as many of them aspire to become artists, writers and Youtubers.

BintangGO, which is headquartered in Singapore, has 10,000 influencers and content creators on its platform - 80 per cent of whom are women and 70 per cent under 30 years of age.

“We built a solution to help nano creators engage with their fans,” said Lee. “These nano creators can earn up to 5 million rupiah (S$470.50) a month in extra income.”

The company teaches these influencers to create videos and other social media posts for various brands and companies. “There are no classes on how to become a content creator so I worked with 5 creators initially to help them grow their income from 300,000 rupiah per month, to over 1 million rupiah,” said Oktorika.

According to Lee, looking at comparative numbers in the United States, there could be 10 million such creators in Indonesia today. “The creators are like the Gojek drivers, so we can be the Gojek for the creator space in Indonesia.”

This space is growing rapidly, said Lee, because businesses and brands have evolved to focus on creators. “Five years ago, the market was focused on celebrities, but today Indonesian consumers are more sophisticated and the impact of celebrities has diminished.”

BintangGo earns between 5 per cent and 25 per cent of the income earned from creators. The company recently raised US$2.5 million from domestic and international investors, which was “a nice sense of validation of our progress”, Lee noted. It is now in discussion to raise further debt capital to help fund creators who need cash to deliver their work before being paid.

Another entrepreneur in Indonesia, Ario Tamat, is also betting big on disrupting the creator space. The 44-year old founded KaryaKarsa in 2019 to cater to creators looking to boost their income.

“We found a niche for ourselves as we started out as a platform that catered to all creators but now we serve mostly writers,” he told BT. Writers make up 40 per cent of KaryaKarsa’s creator base but 75 per cent of its gross merchandise value (GMV). The platform has 99,000 registered creators and more than 600,000 users including customers and clients in search for good writers.

“We focus on helping creators but they bring their users to transact on the platform,” he noted. In 2021, the company booked a GMV of US$573,000 and it has already exceeded that figure in the first 5 months of 2022.

“Writers are at the bottom of the heap in terms of creators getting paid for their work,” Ario said. “On KaryaKarsa, they can control how and when they get published, set up their own fees and own their IP. We also give them 90 per cent of the revenue generated.”

The industry is about to boom given the growing demand for scriptwriters for local movies and TV shows. A locally produced Web series can earn up to US$600 million while locally produced movies can garner close to US$100 million in ticket sales.

KaryaKarsa achieved pre-seed funding of US$498,000 last year and is now looking for pre-series A to expand its platform.

“I started the company with US$14,000 borrowed from family and friends,” Ario shared. “I don’t like burning too much money so I want to reach free cash flow position before we fund-raise again.”

As interest and users pick up, more investors are starting to pay serious attention to this pace. Ario predicts that the number of start-ups in the creator space will likely double over the next 5 years.