Tokobagus

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

~ the eulogy ~

This is a grave for a name rather than for a website. The website is still running. On 20 May 2014 the address tokobagus.com started answering as olx.co.id, and everything underneath stayed exactly where it was, the same company running the same listings for the same people selling the same used motorbikes. Only the word on the front was taken away.

Two Dutch entrepreneurs, Arnold Sebastian Egg and Remco Lupker, started Tokobagus in Denpasar in 2005. The name is about as plain as the product it described, and the product was the oldest idea on the commercial internet: post an ad for something you own, let somebody in the same country find it, take no part in the transaction. The office was in Bali, which was unusual for an Indonesian internet company then and did not stop being unusual later.

The scale it reached is easy to underrate from outside the country. By 2012 it carried more than a million active ads and drew over ten million visitors a month, and it was among the most searched terms on Google in Indonesia that year. By 2013 it was doing a billion page views a month with roughly fifty thousand new ads posted every day. Its television advertising had done what television advertising is for, which is to reach the seller who has never posted anything online in her life. The car spot in particular got quoted back at people.

I never used it and had no reason to. The ending is the part I recognize. In 2016 Turk Telekom pulled its consumer brands into one and TTNet, the name that had been on my bill for a decade, stopped existing. The line into the wall did not change and neither did anything I did with it. There was just a word I had typed a thousand times that stopped going anywhere.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it got that big ~

Naspers invested around 2010, reported at the time as somewhere between twenty and forty million dollars, and that is when the television money started in earnest. Indonesian classifieds in that period were won on TV rather than on search, because the person you needed was not searching for anything. Tokobagus bought the country's attention outright and got what it paid for.

It was also handed a competitor. Naspers owned Multiply, which had converted itself from a social network into a Southeast Asian shopping site, and when Multiply's commerce operation was closed in 2013 its Indonesian traffic was pointed at Tokobagus. The market was being consolidated by ownership well before anybody got around to renaming anything.

~ the rename ~

OLX was a Naspers property operating in more than a hundred countries, and by early 2014 the group had decided a single classifieds brand everywhere was worth more than the local names it had spent years buying. The Philippine site Sulit went first, in March. Tokobagus followed on 20 May, accompanied by a statement whose entire content was that nothing was changing.

Users did not agree that nothing was changing. The complaint was never about features, because there were no feature changes worth the word. It was that a name people had been saying out loud for nine years had been swapped for three letters that meant nothing in Indonesian. Naspers was buying itself a global brand at the price of a local one, and there is no published exchange rate for that trade.

~ what got buried with it ~

Nine years of a brand is a long time in a market that was only about that old. For a stretch, Tokobagus was how a lot of Indonesians first understood that you could sell a thing to a stranger over the internet. That understanding survived the rename, which is the argument for the rename having worked.

The argument against it is everything after. OLX Indonesia spent the following decade losing ground to Tokopedia and later to Shopee, both of which were selling something a classifieds site structurally could not: an actual transaction, with money moving inside the product. In 2023 the business was sold to Astra International, and in 2024 the automotive half was renamed again, to OLXmobbi. The thing has now had more names than it had good years.

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