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ahoo! Indonesia is looking to sharpen the market niche of their media properties and forge new partnerships with media outlets this year to fortify their Internet services, a company director says.

Roy Arnold Simangunsong, Yahoo! Indonesia’s country ambassador and sales director, said that the Internet company would launch better-positioned properties into the market this year.

Yahoo! Indonesia currently has two well-established properties, Yahoo! Indonesia News and Yahoo! Indonesia OMG, which aggregates an assortment of news feeds from several media outlets, including local news wire Antara.

“We will focus on the female niche segment,” Roy told The Jakarta Post.

Roy added that the realignment of channels belonging to Yahoo! Indonesia, in addition to developing content-acquisition strategies, was the “underlying basis in growing our media properties”.

“To make this achievable, we are also looking into partnerships with different media that could feed us with information,” he said, adding that the company was seeking to partner with offline media, including from print and television. That would increase the number of news feeds “adjusted to the media properties that we have”.

However, he declined to name the companies that discussions were taking place with.

Instead of solely appealing to its growing Internet audience that exceeds 40 million people, rolling out new and improved products and properties is part of Yahoo! Indonesia’s strategy to attract more advertisers, given that the digital media is increasingly becoming part and parcel of marketing tactics.

Besides telecommunication operators and other technological companies, Yahoo! Indonesia sought to attract advertisement placements from firms in the automotive and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) sectors, as well as banking and finance industries.

Research firm Frost and Sullivan forecasts vehicle sales to grow 6.5 percent this year to 948,500, which could be attributable to the stable economy, positive buyer sentiments and the introduction of new car models.

“Based on what we’ve seen last year, these industries are within the top five or six [advertisers],” Roy said.

As for overall business this year, Roy said that Yahoo! Indonesia’s growth would remain “quite agreeable”.

He said that Yahoo! Indonesia was visited by 70 percent of Internet users last year, based on Comscore data. The data also shows that their other products, such as mail and messenger, as well as properties including Yahoo! Indonesia OMG, were leaders in their field.

Web information company Alexa ranks Yahoo! as the fourth-most visited site in Indonesia, with search engine Google the most popular website. Google, however, has yet to set up an office in Indonesia.

“We see that we can achieve double-to-triple digit growth for our overall business growth,” he said.