Unwilling To Depend On Ads In Ikatan Cinta Soap Opera, Conglomerate Hary Tanoesoedibjo Pursues Digital Content Revenue

JAKARTA - MNC Group CEO Hary Tanoesoedibjo (HT) is incessantly increasing his contribution from content and digital revenue. The target is that by 2025 the content and digital segments will be able to match the revenue from the television segment in the business that PT. Media Nusantara Citra Tbk is engaged in.

Hary Tanoe hopes that the portion of revenue from television and digital and content can be balanced, namely 50 percent each in the next 4 years. According to him, with a balanced income, the issuer coded MNCN shares will be healthier.

Furthermore, the 33rd richest person in Indonesia explained that this was based on the fact that his company did not rely solely on one segment of income.

"In 3 years to a maximum of 4 years, we will adjust 50 percent of our income to come from digital and content activities. This is because our income consists of three things, the largest being television, then content, and digital," he said, in MNC Investor Group Forum 2021, early March.

Meanwhile, referring to the third quarter of 2020 financial statements, the company's revenue comes from advertising worth IDR 5.52 trillion and content IDR 6.68 trillion. Meanwhile, revenue from advertising is still divided into two, namely from digital and non-digital advertisements, which amount to IDR 675.94 billion and IDR 4.84 trillion, respectively, per the same period.

The details are that revenue from the digital segment comes from the RCTI + application with a share of 40 percent, social media 35 percent, and cooperation and other services of around 20 percent.

Meanwhile, overall the company's revenue during January-September 2020 shrank 4.92 percent on an annual basis or year on year (YoY) to IDR 5.96 trillion from the same period the previous year, which was valued at IDR 6.27 trillion. Meanwhile, net profit was cut 17.5 percent from IDR 1.66 trillion to IDR 1.37 trillion.

RCTI+ is a digital segment revenue driver

The RCTI+ application is one of the drivers of revenue growth from the digital side, which is supported by the use of social media and other digital collaborations. Previously, advertising spots on RCTI+ had to be sold in packages together with advertisements on RCTI television stations.

However, said the man who is familiarly called HT, MNCN can sell ad spots in the application independently. That is, there is no need for a package.

"Now RCTI+ can sell its own advertising spots in large numbers. Some time ago, we generated huge revenues of several billion rupiahs for 1 hour duration," he said.

Previously, HT had projected that the internet would dominate advertising distribution in Indonesia within the next 10 years. This prediction is related to the downward trend in advertising distribution through television channels and print media in previous years. He conveyed this at the National Press Day, Wednesday, February 10.

By 2023, said HT, the distribution of advertisements on television will drop to 68 from 72 percent last year. Then, advertisements in print media shrank to 6 percent from 7 percent previously, while the portion of advertisements on the internet accelerated to 24 percent from 20 percent previously.

HT said that one of the strategies that MNCN has implemented to boost advertising is the use of a bundling scheme. With this scheme, according to him, every advertiser who wants a spot on RCTI must also book a spot in a package along with advertisements on other MNC television stations, such as GTV, Inews TV, and MNC TV.

Furthermore, said HT, the high interest of advertisers cannot be separated from the RCTI rating, which is claimed to be the highest of all Free-to-Air (FTA) television stations in Indonesia, which is 30 percent. This rating was also supported by the Ikatan Cinta soap opera, played by Amanda Manopo as Andin with Aldebaran, starring Arya Saloka.

The soap opera even successfully broke the rating record by being at the top of the rating list of all television programs for broadcast on Tuesday, February 23. The share achieved reaches 51.4 percent and the TVR indicator for the number of viewers watching an event or advertisement at a certain time is 14.6 percent.

The soap opera Ikatan Cinta has caught the attention of the public. The majority of the viewers of this soap opera are housewives who are very fanatical about the relationship between Andin and Aldebara in the soap opera, so that Hary Tanoe's wife, Liliana Tanoesoedibjo always follows this show.

One of the accounts with the name @andhirarum revealed the number of advertisements in one soap opera broadcast. The account also creates a thread about how many advertisements are shown during the soap opera break. She explains that every time there is an ad break, the duration of ad serving can be up to 9 minutes.

"There were 136 advertisements outside of soap operas and 17 ads in the Ikatan Cinta soap opera. Alhamdulillah, Andin has met again with Aldebaran. Let's celebrate with a delicious meal," she wrote, as quoted on Sunday, March 14.

Meanwhile, social media monetization is carried out, among others, through MNCN accounts on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. As of December 2020, the YouTube subscriber count reached 118 million with 37.2 million views. The number of Facebook followers was 42 million as of July 2020, while TikTok was around 33.3 million as of September 2020.