Extra News
Posted on 05-18-2006

Yahoo And Telemundo Forge Common Bilingual Web Site

With the gigantic and increasingly relevant Hispanic market in mind, two companies will merge their U.S. Spanish-language web services, creating @link href='http://Telemundo.yahoo.com'>Telemundo.yahoo.com. The new web site will combine the entertainment content unique to Telemundo with Yahoo en Espanol’s e-mail, music, and search capabilities. Jose Rivera Font, general manager of Yahoo in North America, told the Washington Post his company is going to produce most media, with the exception of downloadable clips of telenovelas, in both languages.

“This site will be targeted to all Hispanics – both in English and in Spanish,” Font said. He also noted that Yahoo’s Hispanic consumers in the United States enjoyed some English content, a notable observation (and a encouraging one to us at Extra).

Over the next months, the two sites will share all of their content. The staffs of each site will merge, and Telemundo and Yahoo will share advertising revenue, but neither will hold ownership stake in the other. It is a unique partnership between the two companies, aimed at securing more of the Hispanic and bilingual market from comparable giants like MSN Latino and Univision.com.

“A consolidation of two of the stronger players online puts pressure on the other players,” said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer, told the Los Angeles Times.

The Post article went on to say that an estimated 12 to 15 million Hispanics in the United States are now online. The estimate seems conservative but marketers and analysts agree that that number will increase exponentially in the coming years, growing by 21 million in four years, according to eMarketer. What is confusing advertisers attracted to the market is that it is still somewhat unclear where it is going and how it will move. But given the importance of the Hispanic audience as consumers, it is something most Internet and media providers will be willing to invest considerable dollars in.

Jose Guillermo Tornoe, consultant for the Latino division of Wizard Academy, a marketing and advertising consulting firm based in Austin, Texas, spoke to the Times about media’s slow but inevitable move toward bilingual content.

“I see a great marketing opportunity in this merger,” Tornoe said. “Hispanics are influencing the general market in so many ways, so to an extent, they’re creating a new general market.”