During its press conference at Kempinski Ballroom, Grand Indonesia, Kaskus announced its partnership with Global Digital Prima (GDP) Venture, part of Djarum Group, which began in January of this year. The announcement also served to deny the rumors that the popular forum had been acquired by Djarum. The amount of investment remains undisclosed and Kaskus remains an independent entity.

Ken Dean Lawadinata, CEO of Kaskus Networks, said that the network plans to expand aggressively to transform Kaskus to become a much more viable business. The expansion includes improvements in Forum Komunitas (Community Forum) and Forum Jual Beli (FJB) (Trading Forum), optimization of KasPay payment system, KasAd advertising platform, as well as moving into the mobile space

Kaskus is turning FJB into a social commerce platform whereby buyers and sellers can trade and interact with much improved confidence through peer reviews, recommendations and testimonials. FJB will also have features such as bidding and bargaining as well as various payment methods that are more suited for Indonesians.

KasPay will be leveraged as one of the payment methods in FJB aside from Rekening Bersama (RekBer) (Joint Account) which had been widely used. KasAd is an advertising platform similar to Google AdSense but with a much lower barrier to adoption, made easier for individuals and small to medium businesses with relatively small budget to target advertising campaigns inside and outside of Kaskus Networks.

Kaskus this year will also increase the number of servers it uses to a total of 250 to cope with the rising traffic and number of members. The message board will also increase the headcount to around 80 people and move its office to a much larger one to accommodate the new personnel.

Kaskus is the largest online forum in Indonesia, established eleven years ago by three Indonesian students in Seattle, Ken Dean Lawadinata (CEO), Andrew Darwis (CTO), and Danny Oei (CMO). Kaskus is now managed by Kaskus Networks (PT Darta Media Indonesia) and has over 2.6 million listed members with over 900 million page views in one month this past February.

Based on Alexa, Kaskus is the sixth most popular website in Indonesia, better than popular news sites Detik.com and Kompas.com. While there are roughly 40 million Indonesians online, Kaskus is accessed by 53 million people from all around the world.

Lawadinata said they chose GDP Ventures from eight other investors due to the shared vision, comfort, ease of expansion options, and long term strategy into developing the network.

Disclosure: DailySocial is incubated by Merah Putih Inc. and is part of GDP.

Translated by Nita Sellya