Surfing In Two Worlds

February 2, 2006
Via LatinBuzz

How important is the U.S. Hispanic online market?

A good measure is that ad spending aimed at this audience reached $100 million in 2005, according to estimates by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). That's up 33 percent from 2004 when spending in the market was $75 million, and up 10-fold from 2002, when it was just $10 million. This quick turn of the media buyers' heads reflects the rapid emergence of a vibrant Hispanic Internet marketplace – largely dominated by second- and third-generation Web users – even as the major traditional media ad spending targets have seen a slowdown in growth.

Seventy Percent of Hispanic English-Users Wired Reflecting Web-demographic research, many of the ads directed at this rising Hispanic audience are delivered either in English or both English and Spanish. The objective is to capture the significant numbers of English-dominant or bilingual Hispanic surfers who "live in two worlds" according to a Yahoo! spokes-person – often preferring English for searches they conduct at work, and Spanish or bilingual sites for surfing from home.

Of a total U.S. Hispanic Web audience of 14.4 million unique visitors in 2005 – as measured by the Web trackers at comScore Media Metrix – 11.3 million individuals (79 percent) expressed a preference for English or bilingual online materials. More specifically: 7.5 million of the total Hispanic audience (52 percent) prefer English, and another 3.8 million (27 percent) prefer bilingual materials.

Moreover, the online Hispanic audience is growing fast: up 6 percent in 2005, and set to grow at an annual rate of 6.7 percent through 2008, versus 2.8 percent a year for the overall U.S. online population, according to eMarketer. The overall Hispanic Web audience is still demographically disproportionate – Hispanics account for only 7.1 percent of all U.S. Web users but 14 percent of the population. Nevertheless, a Pew Internet & American Life Project "Digital Divisions" report released in October 2005 concludes, "our surveys, conducted only in English, consistently find that English-speaking Hispanics are as likely as non-Hispanic whites to use the Internet (70 percent of each group)."

Among the most-visited sites, owing to the U.S. Hispanic Internet audience's tendency to prefer English for surfing, the sites Hispanics visit most are general-audience media sites such as AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft's MSN.com portal, Google, and eBay. And, because these sites aggregate their total users among all their different domains, it is difficult to know how many Hispanics visit the Hispanic-specific parts of these portals. A listing developed by HispanTelligence® – the research arm of Hispanic Business – that includes only Hispanic-oriented sites, and using the ranking methodology developed by Web site statistics tracker Alexa.com, puts Univision.com in first place, followed by The Miami Herald site and the Terra U.S. site.

Comments

[Joel Bary]

It is interesting to read your comments about the surfing trends of the US Hispanic Population. And as insightful as your data is, I would also like to add that the online hispanic users not only browse in english and/or in spanish within US based web sites, hispanics also visit their country of origin web sites like newspapers and others. It is interesting to notice that the behavior of the online hispanic users is much more complex than the US general user. In order to plan accordingly for this audience, we need to establish the real objectives, and the real profile of our target audience, because that will definitely impact the outcome of the media plan. A first generation Hispano does not follow the same trend as the one considered as part of a third generation, and the Hispano from Mexico is not the same as the hispano from Republica Dominicana, therefore, it is very important when planning for this audience to get a qualified advice and to be backed by a true specialist in the field, and nowadays, traditional advertising agencies and advertisers are not doing so. Online advertising is not just about launching a spanish web site, is about relevance, is about content, is about reaching the users on their terms and on appealing to their needs, this is a whole new and potential market. It is true that Univision, the Miami Herald, Terra, Starmedia/Wanadoo and others are the most visited hispanic web sites, but are we really looking for just traffic ? or are we looking for a specific target composition ? that is the main question that we need to be looking at, when planning and defining a marketing and advertising strategy for our very own US Hispanic Online Audience.
Joel Bary
C.E.O.
LatinMedios.com, Inc.
Online Media, Marketing and Advertising Strategies
for the Hispanic and LATAM Markets.

[Ignacio Roizman]

Good comments from Joel.
Also, I'd like to add that it's that particular nature of the US Hispanic segment, the fact that it is composed of subgroups defined by different variables, that makes the online an effective media to reach in an accurate way the audience brands are targeting.

There has to be a cultural change on the brand and agency side to open the door to more active media planning and buying models. Agencies tend to do all the work prior to going online with a campaign, while on the interactive media, the monitoring and fine tunning once on-air brings to the table the key advantage over other channels.

Alternatives such as those proposed by Joel, placing advertising at the audience's country of origin has proven to be a very effective way reach US Hispanics, particularly those that are not being reach by local Spanish sites in the US (for example, expatriate professionals in the US, looking for local news from their country of origin, would certainly not wath Telemundo's news or site covered with Telenovelas information)

Ignacio Roizman
e-volution digital marketing