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Jakarta Post

Tickling gags

Need to cheer up? Check out malesbanget

Putera Hasudungan (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Sun, December 9, 2012

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Tickling gags

N

eed to cheer up? Check out malesbanget.com.

After vanishing from the online world for three years, malesbanget.com is back, ready to entertain Internet users once again.

From silly pieces to satirical jokes about politicians, the website offers gags that will make visitors burst into laughter or raise an eyebrow.

As well as articles, the website now also offers videos — mostly parodies — that are categorized by 7 serials and
3 originals.

The self-created videos were purely for entertainment and they can be accessed anytime, anywhere with an Internet
connection.

The website was co-founded by six Indonesians, who often hung out in a specific channel of the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network back in 2002. They thought that it would be awesome to write and record their gags.

They then registered the domain name malesbanget.com in 2002 to accommodate articles on the website, which was launched on April 2003.

“After the website was created, all the co-founders then gathered in Jakarta since some of us were students who studied abroad and met each other only through the IRC,” the website’s co-founder, Christian Sugiono, told The Jakarta Post in his office.

He said that there was no intention to create a particular website to focus on humor at that time — merely to write funny stories based on their conversations about their daily lives.

Christian said that the website went into a hiatus because all of the website’s co-founders were busy from 2006 until late 2009.

In early 2010, jointly with Aryo Sayogha and Arianjie, he tried to slowly revive the website.

Aside from their own pockets, they then received funding for the website from an investor in order to manage the website professionally. The website was re-launched in April 2011 and is managed by MBDC Media Co. Ltd.

“We’re open to cooperation with other investors. We believe that we could be the leading humor website in Indonesia,” he said without elaborating further.

The website’s name, which is an expression usually used by people to convey an air of indolence, has attracted different opinions about the website.

“Back in the very beginning we talked about unimportant things that actually didn’t need to be written about and tried to offer another perspective on things and events that were close to our daily lives,” Aryo said.

He said that the website emphasized irony as a sense of humor, using widely discussed social and political topics that have become “public knowledge” as sources of inspiration.

Christian said that in November last year, the website hit the 1 million page views mark, and since then, the number has increased by 20 percent, even though there were lulls in some months.

In October this year, the website’s traffic reached 2 million page views.

“We don’t choose the people who access this website. However, after running for more than a year since being relaunched, around 60 percent of the website’s visitors are males, young adults [age 18 to 30 years old], mostly located in Jakarta,” Aryo said.

 

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