It’s been over a week since Yahoo laid off 2000 of its employees globally and we also saw that it dismantled the Koprol team along with it. The Indonesian engineers had been working on various other Yahoo products aside from Koprol and they were casualties of an effort to make the company more efficient. It was a simple numbers game and the Koprol team came up short.
While Yahoo did not announce an end to Koprol, the axing of the team said enough; Koprol is going away soon. The question now is, is there a need for it to be reborn outside of Yahoo?
Ever since the acquisition it’s been difficult to see where Koprol fits in the direction that Yahoo was taking ever since it declared itself to be a digital media company, one that delivers advertising to various digital media properties.
While the common understanding of media properties would include blogs, news sites, and portals, Yahoo also includes email, messenger, mailing lists or groups and forum posts, which is fair enough. Koprol is also by definition a media channel, one that delivers content to a group of audience. It is also a media channel with a very niche subscriber base. If you compare Koprol to Yahoo’s other properties such as Yahoo News, Sports, OMG!, Mail, and Messenger, it perhaps would be akin to a community newsletter as opposed to a regional or national newspaper.
A community newsletter contributes little to the bottom line of the larger group and perhaps costs little as well in the bigger picture but unless it has its own revenue stream, it is a cost center especially since this particular one has yet to be able to sustain itself.
A community newsletter however provides a valuable service to community members. A town of 30 thousand is not better served by a newspaper looking at various issues at a national scale. That town needs its own outlet. Even a city of two million needs its own media outlet. The importance of issues is relative to the number of people it affects, and in many cases, whom it affects.
Koprol’s influence is not very far reaching but to those who do rely on it, it has its value, therefore it is perhaps worth looking into whether it needs to be reborn. There is at least one investor who is willing to fund a rebirth of Koprol but until Yahoo swings the axe, the fate of Koprol 2.0 which was being planned for release in May remains uncertain.
Yahoo could retain the name or the intellectual property associated with Koprol. It may prevent former employees to carry over the service in some other form. However, it is also equally possible for Yahoo to release Koprol either in a limited fashion or in its entirety. With the recent organizational changes though, it does not seem that Yahoo has a need for a neighborhood notice board or a community newsletter.
With this in mind, possibilities are still abound but time could be running short, ironically due to the skills that Koprol’s engineers and designers have. Headhunters are already on the loose and many former Yahoos are already fielding offers from various other large companies, startups, media agencies, and so on.
Koprol had nearly 30 people in its team when the announcement was made, but when it started it had less than 10. If the co-founders or some other party wish to reboot Koprol, they probably wouldn’t need to employ too many so start with; 10 is probably enough to get the engines running. Give the new service a couple of years or three to really hash out a business model, and maybe Indonesia can have its neighborhood noticeboard back up and running.
