Kaskus is 11 years old and still rocking

Last Saturday, Kaskus celebrates its 11th birthday which they announced at our own SparxUp Awards 2010 Awarding Night event. Both CEO, Ken Lawadinata and founding CTO Andrew Darwis came to the event and tell a bit about how Kaskus started and its plans to the future now that the industry has grown a lot better than the time Kaskus was started.

Andrew started Kaskus while studying at Seattle with his two friends Ronald and Budi, although the last two founders left a few years later leaving Darwis with the unfortunate task of maintaining the forum and paying for servers. It was intended to be a forum for Indonesian students studying in the US. For a few years the forum gained significant number of loyal followers and members, and took shape into one of the biggest porn board for Indonesian internet users. When Indonesian government released the anti-porn policy in 2008, Darwis knew he would have to shut down the porn sub-forum and it was a hard decision leaving users in rage and threatening leaving Kaskus for good.

But this strategic decision turns out as one of Kaskus' biggest success by growing their user base as they doubled in 1.5 years, and gained big advertisers such as banks and multinational IT companies. It simply a turning point for Kaskus, they are now the biggest online community in Indonesia and one of the most active online forums in the world.

Darwis also pointed out about their future plans for Kaskus at the event. Hinted that they will start making some serious money out of Kaskus using two platforms : Kaspay and KasAd. Kaspay is Kaskus' own online payment gateway and KasAd is a self-serve ad platform for display in Kaskus' forums. Although the ads displayed from KasAd is not gaining much traction (judging from the number of ads displayed), Danny Oei (Chief Marketing Kaskusnetworks) claimed that KasAd is doing great and give Kaskus a significant amount of revenue and that they will keep growing.

Nevertheless, Kaskus has definitely been one of Indonesia's most promising internet company and an Indonesian online landmark. Happy birthday Kaskus, may you live long and prosper!