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Indonesia`s state-owned news agency LKBN ANTARA introduced new news portal www.antaranews.com on Monday.
The company`s president director, Ahmad Mukhlis Yusuf, said in line with retail business strategy that had been set Antara was developing retail contents in cooperation with various information technology intrastructure owners to assure business development.

The www.antaranews.com is the continuation of its earlier domain www.antara.co.id as an on-line media for the public. The new portal was launched under the theme “New Look, New Feel and New Experience.”

from: antaranews.com

Yet another sad story of big site switching from dot co.id to dot com. Before, it was Kompas who “relaunched” it’s website from Kompas.co.id to Kompas.com.

It tells us how difficult your position is if you have a popular name under unpopular domain extension. While people may remember your name, they will have a hard time remembering the extension. Asking  people to remember BOTH your domain name AND your domain extension is not as easy as it seems. In the era of information overload, people are just exposed to too many things to remember them all. Choose a dotcom name, and half of your branding effort is done. I wonder how many people get lost daily, trying to reach antara.co.id but type-in antara.com instead.

It is sad because the old extension happens to be our country code top level domain (ccTLD),  a ccTLD that is so poorly managed that not even 50,000 domains have been registered.  With that level of registration, not even all Indonesians are familiar with the extension. Antara.co.id is now redirected to antaranews.com.

It’s a lesson that others should really learn. Or else, they will repeat the same costly mistake.  There are now a number of “non- dotcom” local websites being promoted heavily with huge advertising budget:  TVOne.co.id, RCTI.tv, Seleb.tv, TransTV.co.id, just to name a few. How long will it take before they realize that TVOne.com/TVOneNews.com, RCTINews.com, SelebTV.com, or TransTV.com are a better name? And that they are now losing thousands of potential visitors daily to the latter names?

Sometimes, I really feel that fellow Indonesians are sooo slow in embracing the net. It may take another decade before the majority of public go online, utilizing the net for communications and commerce the way peoples in more developed countries are doing right now.

Internet penetration is still desperately low in this fourth most populous country in the world. To give you a perspective, let’s just take a quick look on how the three most popular news portals in Indonesia (Kompas.com, Detik.com, Okezone.com) are doing in terms of traffic.

My snapshot from Compete.com doesn’t show an encouraging picture. Total internet traffic has been more or less the same from month to month for all players. There seems to be no apparent growth. What’s more, combined traffic of the three  is less than 100,000 unique visitors per month. Even blogs like Problogger.net, JohnChow.com and StevePavlina.com have much bigger traffic than that.

No wonder why The Big G still considers this market too small.

In my previous post, I learned that telling obese idiots how to lose weight is BIG billion dollar business. Apparently, besides having too much fat in their body, they have a deep pocket, too

Yesterday, I also learned there’s another solution for these deep pocket idiots being circulated for free on the net. It’s a solution for yet another “problem” they have: too much time. Just check this out: How to Keep an Idiot Busy for Hours.