Berniaga.com

» see berniaga.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Ask about a classifieds market anywhere and people can name the winner. Second place is harder even for the people who live there, and from outside the country it is invisible. I could not have named Indonesia's number two. Asked the same question about my own country I would give you one name and then stop, which is roughly the amount of room this category leaves for a runner-up.

Berniaga.com launched in December 2009, operated by 701Search, a Singapore company with a strange shareholder list. Two Norwegian media groups, Schibsted and Telenor, held it alongside Singapore Press Holdings. The name means to trade, and the product was what Tokobagus was already doing: free listings with no money moving through the site, paid for by placement and advertising around the edges.

For five years it was the credible alternative. It got into the top handful of Indonesian websites by traffic and it ran distribution deals that made browsing effectively free, including an Opera arrangement that handed Telkomsel subscribers millions of hours of data aimed at Berniaga specifically. Then on 14 November 2014 the owners of both sites announced they were merging, and second place turned out to be a shareholding rather than a business.

~ the dossier ~

~ the merger ~

The deal was between Naspers and 701Search, and its shape says the whole thing. Naspers took 64 percent of the Indonesian joint venture and 701Search took 36. When two companies combine and one ends up with roughly a third, that side's product is not the one that survives the year. Alif Priyono, OLX's chief operating officer, put it about as gently as it can be put: the OLX name and platform would stay, and Berniaga's site and users would transfer over after approvals.

The same two shareholders were making the identical arrangement in three other markets at the same time. This was portfolio management between people who already knew each other, not a fight anybody lost on the merits, and the Indonesian market got a monopoly out of it without a single customer being asked.

~ the deletion ~

Traffic started redirecting to OLX.co.id on 14 January 2015 and the site closed for good on the twenty-sixth. The part worth writing down is what did not move. Only listings posted after 11 November 2014, and only those meeting OLX's own terms, were carried across. Everything older was deleted.

Nobody was harmed in a way that makes news, since a classified ad is supposed to expire and mostly nobody wanted the old ones. But that database was five years of a country's small-scale commerce written down by the people doing it: what a used Honda cost in Surabaya in 2011, what a secondhand phone was worth in a town with no store selling new ones. It was a low-resolution picture of Indonesian household economics and it is not anywhere now.

~ the leftovers ~

Berniaga's staff were told they could apply for jobs at the company that had just closed their site. OLX said it would absorb the best talent through a selection process. There is no crueler way to phrase a redundancy, and it was probably meant kindly.

~ what happened to the owner ~

701Search kept its other Southeast Asian sites and did fine out of them. Mudah in Malaysia carried on under its own name, so did Cho Tot in Vietnam. Telenor bought out the other two partners in 2017, Singapore Press Holdings taking about 109 million dollars for its exit, and in 2019 the whole of 701Search was merged into Carousell.

So the parent kept every regional brand it owned except one. Berniaga was the piece traded away first, in the one market where the competitor was strong enough that fighting cost more than folding. Being second in a big country is worth less than being first in a small one, which is a lesson nobody needed a website to die to learn but here is a website that died to prove it.

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