Surya Gunawan, a former audience analyst at KacaKota Media, says the Jakarta-based service reported 14.6 million viewers for its reality competition “The Last Table” when just 2.7 million people had watched an episode. The difference, he says, came from counting automatic replays and repeat launches as new viewers.
Gunawan told The Plausible Post in an interview that he helped prepare weekly audience summaries before leaving the company in May. He has provided 43 screen recordings of playback tests and billing summaries, which he says show the same accounts counted multiple times. KacaKota says its figures follow a standard industry definition of a “view”.
The party behind the numbers
The claim became harder to ignore after KacaKota’s 10th-anniversary celebration on 18 September. The office was dressed as a miniature version of “The Last Table”: bright coloured panels, oversized prop cutlery and cakes moulded into tiny television sets. At the party, executives announced the show had passed 14 million viewers, calling it the platform’s biggest Indonesian hit.
“We were turning one person pressing play five times into five people in the headline,” Gunawan said. He said his former team was told to use the bigger figure in sales presentations to advertisers, who bought packages based on reported audience reach. “The party was celebrating a number we knew was built on repeats,” he said.
We were turning one person pressing play five times into five people in the headline.
Surya Gunawan, former audience analyst
Advertisers want a recount
KacaKota spokesperson Jamalia Lazuardi rejected the allegation, saying the company counts “qualified episode starts” rather than unique individuals. “Our reporting is consistent with the viewing metrics used across streaming services,” she said, adding that advertisers receive definitions alongside their campaign reports. She did not answer questions about whether autoplay and repeat launches were counted separately.
Gunawan estimates the disputed figures affected 23 advertising campaigns worth Rp78 billion (about €4.4 million). That total includes deals tied to three KacaKota reality shows and a cooking series. He said one advertiser asked for a review after comparing its campaign report with a smaller sample of account-level viewing data.
The calculations he supplied compare accounts that began an episode with reported “viewer starts” across several weeks. In one week, he said, 1.1 million accounts generated 6.4 million starts for “The Last Table”. He says the service’s reporting method could record another start after a playback ended and restarted, even on the same account.
A media-measurement consultant, Kari M. Mortensen, said streaming companies use different definitions, but clients should be able to see whether a figure means accounts, devices or plays. “Those are not interchangeable numbers,” she said. She has not audited KacaKota’s data and said Gunawan’s materials would need independent verification before advertisers could estimate losses.
Indonesia’s National Screen Council, a fictional industry body set up to review audience claims, said it had received a request to examine the case and expected to publish guidance by 15 October. Gunawan said he was willing to give evidence. KacaKota has not said whether it will provide its playback records, but Lazuardi said the company would cooperate with “any proper review”.
