AOL Unveils Hispanic Sports Blog, Olympic Initiatives

Fanaticos screengrabAOL Latino, the Web portal's hub for U.S. Hispanics, kicks off a new sports blog dubbed Fanáticos.com today, tied to the start of the Summer Olympics.

 

At launch, the site will focus especially on Olympics coverage, as well as fútbol (soccer), across the U.S., Mexico, Latin America and Spain. Content devoted to baseball, boxing and other sports of particular interest to the Hispanic audience will be added in the coming months.

Modeled after AOL's FanHouse.com, the bilingual Fanáticos.com will offer editorial content from nine different sports bloggers. They include Pablo Seone, an Argentine writer who covers Latin American sports trends and soccer tournaments such as Copa Libertadores and Copa Sudamerica; Juan Vené, known as Major League Baseball's voice "en espanol;" and soccer expert Omar Porcayo.

"Latinos are passionate about sports and their favorite teams, and Fanáticos offers them a culturally relevant, Spanish-language outlet for their opinions," said Miguel Ferrer, AOL Latino's director of programming.

The move extends AOL's overall strategy to create scores of niche sites that serve as "passion points" for Web users and provide targeted audiences to advertisers.

Based on the success of FanHouse, which recently won an EPpy Award for Best Sports Blog, Ferrer said a guiding principle for Fanáticos is to let users help shape the tone and substance of the site. "Over time, it really will be what our audience is asking for," he said. "Our goal is to set the stage for them to take over and let them talk about the things they're interested in."

That community-building effort will include allowing users to share content, post comments, and participate in polls and contests, among other things.

For the Olympics, coverage will be divided among its blogs and focus on soccer, baseball, boxing and basketball as well as athletes and national teams from Mexico and Latin American countries. Syndicated news stories, video clips and photos from AOL content partners will supplement original material.

In the next six months, the site will also launch dedicated soccer team and player pages that include articles, biographies, news feeds and blog posts. Fanáticos will also introduce a video search engine powered by AOL's Truveo and add more bloggers.

Advertising on the new site is powered by Platform-A, AOL's digital ad business, and spans both display and text ads. AOL will unveil the initial sponsor for Fanáticos in mid-August, but declined to provide further details.

The site will also carry ads that run across AOL Latino. Brands including Wal-Mart, Volkswagen, Nissan and Toyota advertise on the Hispanic-oriented section that had 1.5 million unique visitors in June, according to comScore. Nielsen Online estimates the site's traffic somewhat lower at 1 million visitors.

Apart from the new Fanáticos blog, AOL is jumping on the Olympics bandwagon with dedicated sites through its Sports section as well as its Black Voices portal aimed at African-Americans. AOL's main Olympics page features breaking news, video feeds from NBC, photo galleries and athlete profiles.

A downloadable toolbar to be added Friday will let users track medal counts and link to Olympics-related news and other content.

Samsung Mobile is the primary site sponsor. With its "Medal Mania" campaign that launched last month, it centers on an online scavenger hunt for virtual gold medals to win $100,000. The Black Voices Olympic effort features a showcase of top African-American Olympians over the last 40 years sponsored by Chevy.

During a conference call discussing Time Warner's second-quarter earnings Wednesday, CEO Jeff Bewkes said AOL's content verticals had seen strong traffic growth, but display advertising revenue fell 14% compared to the year-earlier period due to pullbacks in categories like automotive, financial services, telecom and travel.

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