In 2008, Kaskus was voted as one of the most visited Indonesian websites according to Alexa.com. Kaskus was an online forum community which had grown by the word of mouth marketing of its members and mainly consisted of a user-generated content forum and a trading section. This local forum already had more than 350,000 loyal members who called themselves “Kaskusers” and participated in their own community culture. Kaskus contained a discussion forum with sub-forums covering a variety of topics including games, the buying and selling of goods, sports, automotives, and many others. What was unique about Kaskus was that it maintained all of its content in Bahasa Indonesia.

Its notorious BB-17 forum which mainly consisted of porn content, was heavily associated with KASKUS by the Indonesian Internet community. This burdened KASKUS’s image and its attempt to capture the tremendous growth of Internet users in Indonesia at that time. Facebook, Friendster and other online social networks has been grown explosively in Indonesia. At the same time, a new law on information and electronic media, Law No.11/2008 on Electronic Information and Transaction (ITE), came into effect and ruled that websites should not contain pornographic content. Therefore KASKUS were left with no choice but to drop BB-17. However, building a new positive image would be no an easy task.

With the new board of management, Ken Dean Lawadinata (CEO), Andrew Darwis (founder, CIO) and Danny Oei Wirianto (CMO), Kaskus was facing a dilemma whether they should remain exclusive or becoming a mainstream online content.