By : Ade & Aries
The Indonesia media market
The last few years the development of alternative media in Indonesia increased rapidly. The public has more choice in getting information. According to data of the Media Index by Nielsen the number of people who receive the news through print media in the last year (2008 -2009) decreased with almost 3 percent (from 33,49% to 30,6% all media readers), while those who use the Internet for their news consumption increased with almost 4 percent (from 7,54% to 11,29% all media readers).
The Indonesian newspaper industry is suffering from what could be its worst financial crisis. According to Tempo’s internal research, advertising revenues are slightly decreasing due to the severe economic downturn (semester 1 2008-2009, decline -7%), while readership habits are changing as consumers turn to the Internet for free news and information.
Yahoo! and Nielsen announced the results of a joint study which has identified the challenges, opportunities and potential solutions for digital media practitioners and marketers in this region. The table below reveals the forecast expenditure on online advertising across each of the Southeast Asia markets under investigation.
Source: Yahoo and Nielsen Report, December 2008
Note: The meaning of display ad is in the form of banner ads, and the search is a form of text ads that are on the page of search engines page. 
Our online marketing strategy
Indonesian online media have the same problems. Internet users are growing but the media can’t maximize their revenues because a lot of online media still had a low page views and also advertisers haven’t much understand the effectiveness and efficiency of online advertising. This means that our marketing strategy must be redefined. We (Tempo interactive and The Jakarta Post) have generally speaking the same strategy on marketing. We offer integrated advertising in both our media print and online media. We approach our advertiser personally and educate them about the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising. The print media should present their news both in print and online to attract readers to both print and online media. So the increasing online readership will contribute to the growth of advertising revenue.
Successful story
Based on statistics from www.internetworldstats.com there are currently 13,791,800 Internet users in the Netherlands, with a penetration rate of 82.9%. This means almost everybody in the Netherlands (16 million inhabitants) is using the Internet.
The graph is informed that the growth in online advertising from the year 2007-2012 experienced growth of € 726 million (85% growth). While growth for advertising in print media growth only € 152 million (15% growth).
There are some print media that do convergence news. For example is Financieele Dagblad and NRC Handesblad. Both have different characteristic readers.
Financieele Dagblad particularly in the fields of business and finance sectors has 1 million unique visitors a month. They also have 30,000 mobile visitors. The online revenue reaches 2 million euro a year compared to the total ad revenue that they had . What they do to get good revenue is content Banner, classified ad, career, charged archives, advertorial concepts (fd.selection), home-page takeover (the ad cover the entire front page for a several seconds). Apart from offering diverse forms of online advertising, the advertising strategy of the FD relies on integrated marketing team of print and online.
The readers of NRC Handelsblad belong to a different segment as Financieele Dagblad. The NRC readers form a liberal audience with more concern for national, international and business stories. NRC has 1 million page views per month and also 10,000 subscribers for the digital edition (e-paper). Besides the digital edition and advertising revenue, NRC also receives extra income from an online store selling DVDs, books, wine, etc.
The online reader of Financieele Dagblad is bigger than NRC, because Financieele Dagblad has many diverse features and services on their website (such as z24.nl, Fd.selection, Fondsnieuws.nl and Fd.Intelligents) rather than on NRC.
The two newspapers show that they use a strategy depending on the profile of their readers, and it helps them to increase their online revenues.
What we can do to increase revenue.
Once we know the online advertising market is growing, accompanied by the use of the Internet as an alternative for the increasingly widespread news, the opportunity to generate more revenue is widely open.
But so far, no one has come up with a suitable business model for convergence print and online media. The media still trying to find out and applies what kind of model that fits to them.
The key challenge for newspapers is to hold on to lucrative print readers, while finding ways to make more money from a growing online audience that generally reads the paper for free.
If we look at the success of getting revenue from the examples of the Dutch newspapers FD and NRC we can draw some conclusions about our own possible strategies.
Converging marketing team and news room for print and online media, charge the archived articles, and exploring new and creative advertising (such as homepage take over) as long as it is not annoying, digital edition (e-paper) and online store are several methods we can apply to our website. Maybe some things will run well, maybe not. However, it would be better if we try and see the results. The success of the method depends on market conditions and the readers itself.
Print to Online Journalism 