USA TODAY newspaper article includes Quepasa.com. Link below:
usatoday.com
Web cultivates Latin American market
Presence of Hispanics on Net grows fast
By Shawn Young
USA TODAY
NEW YORK -- Web sites and portals catering to U.S. Hispanics have
burst online and into the advertising and investment mainstream in recent
months, focusing both entrepreneurs and the Internet's most established
players on the USA's fastest-growing minority group.
'There's this humongous trend and focus on this market, which has been
untapped,' says Gary Trujillo, chief executive of Quepasa.com, a bilingual
portal based in Phoenix that caters to U.S. Hispanics.
While only about 20% of the nation's roughly 31 million Hispanics are
online at home, that number will jump to 43% this year when access at
work, school or a library is included, says Ekaterina Walsh, analyst at
Forrester Research.
With U.S. Hispanics buying PCs twice as fast as everyone else and the
Internet starting to make inroads in Latin America, signs are everywhere
that the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking market is coming into its own
on the Net.
* Four Hispanic Web services -- StarMedia Network, Quepasa.com,
Terra Networks and El Sitio -- have gone public since May.
* Two of the top Internet service providers, AT&T and Prodigy, have
launched Spanish-language services. Local phone giants SBC
Communications and BellSouth plan to do the same.
* Yahoo has been available in Spanish since 1998, and Lycos launched a
service for U.S. Hispanics in October.
* Yupi.com, another Hispanic service, is promoting itself -- in English --
on mainstream network television.
* America Online and Excite At Home have joined a growing list of
companies targeting Hispanic markets in Europe, Latin America and the
USA. Microsoft is working with Telefonos de Mexico to develop portals
in Latin America and the USA.
* Spanish-language television giant Univision is planning a big push onto
the Web and is refusing advertising from rival sites and services.
'Four years ago, nobody believed there was an Internet market for
Spanish-speaking people around the globe. We're going to see a huge
explosion this year,' says Fernando Espuelas, CEO of StarMedia.
In Latin America, Web entrepreneurs and new Internet services are
cropping up almost daily. 'There's been an explosion in free access in
Latin America in the last three weeks,' says Lucas Graves of Internet
research firm Jupiter Communications.
Hispanics in the USA are the low-hanging fruit for advertisers and
entrepreneurs, Graves says. Although U.S. Hispanics generally have lower
household incomes than most other ethnic groups, they make an attractive
market for several reasons, including size. Hispanics spend heavily on
communications with relatives in Latin America, a trait that has long
attracted long-distance phone carriers and is pulling Hispanics onto the
Internet. Also, Hispanic consumers tend to be younger and more loyal to
brands than the average consumer, Forrester's Walsh says.
StarMedia and El Sitio say advertisers spent $1.7 billion in 1998 chasing
$273 billion in Hispanic purchasing power. Terra estimates current
purchasing power at $458 billion. So far, only a fraction of the advertising
aimed at Hispanics has gone on the Web. But with PC prices dropping
and more content tailored to Hispanics, the Hispanic Net is getting too big
for advertisers to ignore.
The risk for Web entrepreneurs is that bilingual consumers in the USA
already get what they want from the Web on English-speaking sites,
particularly AOL. There is now enough competition among Spanish and
Portuguese sites that upstarts face the delicate task of specializing enough
to distinguish themselves but not so much that they alienate their audience,
Walsh says.
More broadly, Graves says, 'The risk is really that the market is not
ready.' In Latin America, the Internet is still a somewhat expensive rarity
among consumers. And e-commerce barely exists -- stalled by high tariffs,
non-existent return policies, erratic delivery services and lack of secure
payment methods.
On the Web, though, the disadvantages of arriving first have rarely
outweighed the opportunity. 'It's very important to establish a position,' El
Sitio CEO Roberto Cibrian-Campoy says. After that, 'The most
important challenge for us is to manage the growth.' |
