• by May 3, 2004

Hispanics are probably the fastest growing group of consumers going online, and yet there has been relatively little content devoted to their interests and needs. However, new initiatives spearheaded by Yahoo! and America Online and supported by key partners augur a change in the status quo.

For starters, today Yahoo! en espanol said it will team up with Fox Pan American Sports, one of the biggest Spanish-language sports TV companies, to launch a co-branded Spanish-language sports site for Fox Sports en Espanol. One of the key elements of the deal: Yahoo! Sports will offer exclusive streaming video of Fox Sports en Espanol's coverage of Copa Toyota Libertadores and Copa Sudamericana, two major soccer competitions. Yahoo! Argentina and Yahoo! Mexico will also host a co-branded site with Fox Sports Latin America network targeting the Spanish-speaking Latin American market.

Last week, America Online and Ford Motor Co. unveiled Mi Negocio, an online Hispanic business hub packed with networking information, tips and resources, and editorial content from Time Inc. publications including Fortune and Business 2.0. The hub is powered by AOL Latino, AOL's Spanish-language Internet service. AOL says it has approximately 2.5 million U.S. Hispanics using its AOL and AOL Latino services. AOL hopes that the new online business hub will drive people to AOL Latino.

A few facts: Nearly 42 percent of all minority businesses are Hispanic-owned, more than any other minority group. Hispanic entrepreneurship has risen 30 percent since 1998, and one out of 10 small businesses are expected to be Hispanic-owned by 2007, according to the Small Business Administration's Minority-Owned Business Report and the Internal Revenue Service's HispanTelligence.

Further evidence on the growth of Hispanics online was summed up several weeks ago when AOL released the results of its second annual U.S. Hispanic Cyberstudy conducted with RoperASW. That report surveyed home Internet users and found that there are 13 million Hispanics online and that nearly half of them went online for the first time within the past two years. They now spend about 9.5 hours a week online.

Among other notable findings of the Cyberstudy: More than half (53 percent) of offline Hispanics say they expect to get an Internet connection at home within the next two years, and nearly one in five (17 percent) expects to do so within the next six months. About half of offline Hispanics who speak at least some Spanish (49 percent) say there aren't sites and things to do online that are of interest, while more than half of all offline Hispanics (56 percent) say that one reason they aren't online is because they've heard there is too little Spanish content online.

Finally, two-thirds of Hispanic online consumers who speak at least some Spanish (67 percent) wish there were more websites that had information of interest to Hispanic Americans. Nielsen//NetRatings recently reported that Hispanics are the fastest growing group online with more than 12.6 million people accessing the Internet from home.

And that leads to a mea culpa of sorts.

Diana Velez wrote to The Minute last week taking issue with the April 26th column in which I mentioned that UrbanLatino TV aired on Saturdays, really Sundays at 1 a.m. in New York. "Too bad, because that's probably when many Latinos are out on the town," I opined, suggesting that the show might be missing its target audience.

Diana wrote: "While I am not particularly politically correct, I did re-read the line regarding UrbanLatino and viewership and something about it did not sit right. Maybe a little stereotypical, and just a little bit funny."

Thank you Diana for pointing out a stereotype that I didn't mean to perpetuate.