News Summary Application "KeTitik" Presents Strategies to Reach 1 Million Users

Personalization is not only in demand in the service sector, but also information search to news. Personalized news content has grown in popularity in recent years as more people search for and information tailored to user interests and preferences.

The concept of personalized news content refers to the ability to customize news feeds and recommendations based on a user's past behavior, demographics, and preferences. The advent of digital media has made it easier to provide personalized news content to readers.

Launched in 2022 then, Point present a summary of verified news in less than 60 words with an easy-to-recognize UI/UX, like TikTok or Instagram Reels. Recently, KeTitik has also done this rebranding their new logo.

To DailySocial.id, KeTitik Co-Founder Dannis Joseph explained about platform development, monetization strategies and fundraising plans to reach the target of one million users this year.

Leveraging AI

With a population of 280 million and internet penetration reaching 77%, Indonesia is said to be the fastest growing country in the world. Social media platforms, such as WhatsApp, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are very popular among Indonesian users, with 68% of Indonesians getting their news from social media platforms, an increase of 4% from last year.

Most Indonesians (83%) mostly use their smartphones to get news, with laptop use decreasing by 8%. Seeing this trend, KeTitik launched a personalized short format news content application. The app provides verified news summaries in less than 60 words in a familiar UI/UX, like TikTok or Instagram Reels.

"We are keeping the scope of collaboration with all media platforms open. We are not taking users from any platform, instead we will add them. The partnership opens up pintu for us to be able to provide the best range of content for users," he said.

KePoint was built to solve several problems in news access processing. The team uses AI technology to summarize long articles from verified news sources as well as social media. This summary was further refined to make it worth reading. As much as 50% of KeTitik news is summarized by AI and the rest is done by the internal editorial team.

Meanwhile, the KeTitik editorial team has various previous experiences in media and startups. "Our editorial team ensures that news summaries are created only from credible sources. Apart from that, we have also built our own technology that flags abusive language, grammar, and assesses the performance of each summary," said Dannis.

By bringing news and articles to users they may never have encountered, personalized news content can challenge preconceived notions and help people understand complex issues from multiple angles.

Monetization and fundraising

KeTitik will start using various integrated advertising models brand as a monetization strategy. This advertisement is placed so that it does not interfere with the user's screen display, thereby providing a news reading experience that is comfortable, pleasing to the eye, informative and interesting. Currently, KeTitik has 100 thousand users and targets to reach more than one million users by the end of December 2023.

According to Dannis, one of the main benefits of personalized news content is saving time and effort for readers in searching for articles and stories that are relevant to their interests. Readers can filter information to find the most interesting or important stories with the support of algorithms and machine learning on the KeTitik platform.

"We want to build a platform for the next decade. For media platforms, it is important that users like the content, not have to question the veracity of the content and ultimately [they] feel spending time on the [KeTiTik] platform is worth their time. Our first goal is to make KeTitik as the platform of choice for our users to use it regularly every day," said Dannis.

Last year, KeTitik received pre-seed funding injected by Evy Harjono (HiApp) and a number of angel investors from Flip, Moengage, Trusting Social, Chope, and Brig. KeTitik plans to conduct an initial round of fundraising (seed) in the fourth quarter of 2023.

"We have rejected several offers from angel investors because we are not sure of their long-term alignment with the goals we have started with our mission." Dannis concluded.