About Urbanasia.com

Urbanasia.com

Urbanasia.com is an Indonesian news and entertainment web portal headquartered in Jakarta that publishes in Indonesian for young readers, particularly millennials and Generation Z. It was founded in 2019 by Iqbal Prasetya, Achmad Rouzni Noor II and Ken Yunita, growing out of a social media presence begun the previous year, and it combines a news portal with social-media-style sharing in a single platform so that users can both read and contribute information. The portal is a commercial operation and remains active. Within a year of its founding it had run a national video competition in collaboration with Telkomsel, and in November 2020 it was officially registered and factually verified by the Indonesian Press Council (Dewan Pers), milestones that mark its transition from a youth social media experiment into a recognised Indonesian press company.

Origins: From a Social Media Account in 2018 to a News Portal in 2019

Urbanasia began on social media. In a scholarly account of the outlet's founding written by its founder, the media started in 2018 as a new media presence on social media under the name @urbanasiacom, and in 2019 it expanded its business into online media with the domain www.urbanasia.com. Reference summaries date the founding of Urbanasia.com itself to 2019 and name its three founders as Iqbal Prasetya, Achmad Rouzni Noor II and Ken Yunita. This social-first origin distinguishes Urbanasia from Indonesian portals that began as websites and later adopted social media: for Urbanasia, the audience community existed first, assembled around a social account aimed at young urban users, and the website was built afterwards to give that community a permanent publishing platform. The timing placed the young outlet inside a fast-changing Indonesian internet market in which news reading was moving decisively onto phones and social platforms, and in which a new portal could plausibly be built audience-first rather than print-first or even website-first.

The Founders' Rationale: A Social-Media-Driven News Medium

The thinking behind Urbanasia is documented in the founder's own academic writing on social-media-driven mainstream online media in the disruption era. That account explains that the decision to build a new medium was informed by survey data from the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association (APJII) showing that just over half of Indonesian internet users, 55.3 percent, used their access to read news articles, and by We Are Social data showing active social media users on mobile devices rising from 66 million to 92 million. In other words, the founders saw a large and growing population that both consumed news online and lived on social media, and designed Urbanasia for the overlap between the two. The same writing frames the project through the uses and gratifications tradition in media studies: audiences are active, choose media for definite purposes, and seek satisfaction of specific needs, so a portal that lets users read, watch, socialise and share speaks to several of those purposes at once. This is why Urbanasia was conceived not as a conventional news site with social buttons attached, but as a hybrid in which the social layer is part of the product itself.

A Portal Built for Millennials and Generation Z

From its founding, Urbanasia.com has tailored its news for young people, especially millennials and Generation Z. At launch, its main coverage focus was lifestyle for the millennial generation, presented as a place where users could share information and news about youth lifestyle. As it developed, the portal broadened into a media platform carrying news on a variety of topics, while retaining its role as a venue for users to share information and news with one another. Its company profile describes the media side of the business as a sharing-benefit platform giving free access to digital journalism content through breaking news, trending stories, influencer stories and special content for millennials and Generation Z, under the motto "Urbanasia a Day, Keeps the #FOMO Away," a slogan that speaks directly to young readers' fear of missing out. The profile adds that all information needed by millennials can be accessed through the Urbanasia.com application or dashboard, and that the site's stylish design is meant to give users a pleasant experience in which they can read, watch, socialise, shop and earn rewards at the same time, with information matched to their interests and hobbies.

Two Business Lines: Urbanasia Media and Urbanasia Jakarta

Urbanasia operates through two lines of business. The first, Urbanasia Media, is the publishing arm described above: the sharing-benefit platform built around free digital journalism for young audiences. The second, Urbanasia Jakarta, is a digital agency which delivers a brand's message through the company's ecosystem in order to engage users, media and influencers in sharing content, connecting consumers, influencers and brands through experiences. The two arms are complementary: the media platform assembles and holds the young audience, while the agency side commercialises the company's ability to reach and activate that audience for brands. The company's own description of its growth path says that its services began by providing social journalism content, offering everyone the ability to watch video content and read text-based content in one place and at one time, and that it planned to expand into other types of digital content and to implement what it calls 360 media development. Through these phases, the company says, it aimed to grow into a "super portal" by collaborating on its basic principle of providing people's needs through networking in the digital era. This agency-plus-media structure is a common survival model among Indonesia's independent digital outlets, and Urbanasia adopted it from its earliest company descriptions.

Social Journalism and User Participation

Participation is the feature that most clearly separates Urbanasia from a standard news portal. Reference accounts describe it as combining a news portal with a social networking service in one platform, and as a place founded for its users to share information and news, not merely to consume them. Its company profile similarly describes its first service step as social journalism content, in which everyone can take part, and describes the platform's journalism as content from which users take benefit through free access. In the founder's academic framing, this reflects a wider disruption-era shift in which internet users are no longer passive readers but can be producers of content as well as consumers, a situation associated with citizen journalism. For readers, the practical result is a portal whose content mix of breaking news, trending items, influencer stories and special features is designed to be circulated and supplemented by its own audience community, the same community the founders had first gathered around the @urbanasiacom social account in 2018. Urbanasia's identity as a youth medium is therefore as much about who produces and shares the content as about who reads it.

The Telkomsel Urvideo Competition 2020

Urbanasia's most visible national project in its early years was the Telkomsel Urvideo Competition 2020, a video competition run in collaboration with Telkomsel, Indonesia's major mobile operator, to mark Youth Pledge Day and Heroes Day in 2020. The programme invited Indonesian content creators to make positive creations for the public under the theme "The Pride of Diversity in Indonesia," chosen to strengthen national pride amid Indonesia's diversity. Registration was open from 15 October to 10 November 2020, and coverage of the competition reported a prize pool of Rp160 million. Participants were free to choose their film genre, from drama and comedy to documentary and animation, provided the work represented the theme, and submitted videos had to run between a minimum of two minutes and a maximum of fifteen minutes. Telkomsel's Vice President of Corporate Communications, Denny Abidin, said the company was enthusiastic about the new initiative for commemorating the two national days, and hoped it would create an easily accessed platform for the public, especially content creators, to channel their work and creativity, with the best videos depicting Indonesia's diversity while upholding national values. For a portal founded only the year before, co-producing a national creator competition with the country's largest mobile brand was a significant marker of arrival, and it fitted Urbanasia's model precisely: young creators, video, social sharing and a participatory platform.

Press Council Registration and Verification in November 2020

In the same season as the Urvideo competition, Urbanasia formalised its status as an Indonesian press company. In 2020 the portal was officially registered with the Press Council (Dewan Pers) and passed its verification process: the Council's factual verification of Urbanasia was carried out on 5 November 2020, and the company was declared verified on 20 November 2020. Press Council verification in Indonesia is the mechanism by which press companies are recorded and checked against professional standards; the Council explains that verification is intended to encourage press companies to uphold the journalistic code of ethics and professional journalism, to protect their journalists, including when they face intimidation or violence while reporting, and to support journalists' welfare and competency testing. For a start-up portal barely a year old, completing factual verification placed Urbanasia within the formally recognised Indonesian press system rather than among the tens of thousands of unregistered sites operating in the country, and the outlet itself publicised the milestone under the headline of having officially been verified by the Press Council. Its listing in the Press Council's press company data remains one of the standard reference points for the outlet's existence and status.

Position in Indonesia's Youth Media Market

Urbanasia.com belongs to a generation of Indonesian digital outlets founded in the late 2010s specifically for young readers, competing for an audience courted at the same time by larger youth-oriented portals and by social platforms themselves. Its documented characteristics are consistent across the sources that describe it: a Jakarta headquarters, publication in Indonesian, a commercial model split between media and agency work, a social-media-first origin in 2018 followed by the website in 2019, an initial lifestyle focus that widened into general news and entertainment, and a platform design that merges reading, watching, socialising, shopping and rewards. The scholarly attention it has received, including a journal study of social-media-driven mainstream online media built around the founder's account of creating it, gives it a documented place in discussions of how Indonesian media changed in the disruption era, when audiences moved to mobile social platforms and new outlets were designed around that behaviour from the start. For directory readers, Urbanasia is best understood as a youth platform that happens to publish news, rather than a conventional newspaper that happens to be online: its founding insight, recorded by its own founder, was that more than half of Indonesia's internet users already read news online and that the winning format for reaching them was a social one.

Summary

Urbanasia.com is a Jakarta-based Indonesian news and entertainment portal founded in 2019 by Iqbal Prasetya, Achmad Rouzni Noor II and Ken Yunita, after the founders had built a youth audience on social media as @urbanasiacom from 2018. Aimed at millennials and Generation Z, it began with lifestyle coverage and expanded into a general platform combining breaking news, trending and influencer stories and special content with social networking features that let users share information and news themselves. The company operates two business lines, the Urbanasia Media publishing platform and the Urbanasia Jakarta digital agency, under the motto "Urbanasia a Day, Keeps the #FOMO Away." In 2020 it partnered with Telkomsel on the Urvideo Competition for young video creators and completed Press Council registration and factual verification, being declared verified on 20 November 2020. It remains an active commercial portal and a documented example of the social-media-driven model of Indonesian online media.