T

he number of female Internet users is only a few numbers shy of their male counterparts. Based on surveys, Indonesian women aged between 18 and 43 spend approximately an hour on the Internet each day, or equal to 17 percent of their total media time. This gives the Internet the potential to reach affluent women — an important consumer segment given their lower price sensitivity. However, Yahoo! Indonesia country editor, Dodi Ibnu Rusydi, in an interview with The Jakarta Post’s Mariel Grazella, said that female-oriented content was still hard to come by, which translates into business opportunity for websites and content providers catering to the female crowd.

Question: As an Internet-based media company, what is the business value in targeting the female Internet audience?

Answer: Based on a survey, 43 percent of Internet users are female. So the difference is only a small margin. Similarly, Yahoo! News Indonesia’s audience is almost 50 percent female. Although the numbers fluctuate, the ratio is roughly 55 percent male and 45 percent female for Yahoo! Indonesia OMG.

As for Yahoo! Indonesia She, the audience is 65 percent female. Men visit our websites because they find that certain content, such as career tips, pertains to their lives as well. Sometimes, they visit the website because they are curious about what women think or they would like to find content that they could refer to with the women in their lives, such as wives or sisters.

Thus, we have targeted females because they have their own specific information and consumption needs, making them a good target market from a sales point of view.

What is the business value of websites with female-oriented content in terms of attracting advertisers to buy advertisement space?

Initially, our audience was concentrated in Yahoo! Indonesia News, which carried all sorts of male and female-oriented content. As a result, we could not build a singular voice for our advertisers to target. We then launched Yahoo! Indonesia OMG on the basis that people consume entertainment news in large numbers. We started to think of what’s next and that is how we decided upon Yahoo! Indonesia She.

Indonesian women between the ages of 18 and 34, especially those who live in big cities, are price conscious and are great media consumers. Based on statistics, 52 percent of women in that segment have access to the Internet, 33 percent read the newspaper, while 99 percent watch television. Almost all of these
women have control over their finances. Those with families are the decision makers when it comes to purchases.

Given the high penetration rates of the medium, the bulk of advertisers still focus on television, but advertisements on television cannot only be targeted to a specific audience. The Internet, however, allows calculations on the kind of audience that visits a website, making it easier for advertisers to target their specific categories in the market. Although the site was only first tested in mid October and officially launched in January, we have detected advertising potential in Yahoo! Indonesia She.

Do you think that content in Internet-based media is still imbued with masculine overtones as compared to something more gender-neutral or sensitive to women’s issues?

National politics drive current affairs and news. It just so happens that most politicians are male. It is still a question whether such content is apt for women. Thus, in determining what content would be attractive for our audience, we conducted research on the most desired content. We then held a small focus group discussion to see what content women would like to see from a website. The results of the research pointed to beauty, fashion and health issues.

It is not that easy to find the appropriate content for women. Sometimes, the tone of the article is not suitable, and sometimes, there are copyright issues with certain media.

That is why we developed our own content for Yahoo! Indonesia She, unlike Yahoo! Indonesia News, in which we source content from our media partners. There are not many content providers who can supply the kind of content we are looking for, although we do take content from our global networks. To make up for this, our staffers contribute articles, but they cannot do this on a constant basis because they have their own workload. We also work with bloggers to supply content and we are satisfied with how that has been going.

Some of your content involves holding discussions on social issues that women face. Do you see that women still have less space in the real world to openly voice their thoughts, thus requiring them to move these talks into the freer Internet realm?

We have held campaigns in which we have had discussions by asking different questions on issues that exist in society, such as inter-religious marriages — for which we have received sizable audience feedback. We have created space for such discussion, not because we think that women find problems in voicing their opinions in society, but because they do not have a special space in which they can voice these thoughts louder.

How do you rate the potential for and competition between websites which cater to women as the number of female Internet users?

Actually, there is still considerable room for growth for all websites in Indonesia. Based on studies, the number of Indonesian Internet users is 40 million people out of a total population of 240 million.

As the number of Internet users continues to soar in the coming two years, websites will not only be racing to attract the existing audience, but also welcome newcomers. Thus, the potential for websites is huge and the competition between websites will be cleaner because everyone will be developing the Internet sphere together, which is far from being a zero sum game.