I just happened to come across a site that I believe successfully tapped into the Hispanic online community with content that is both popular and relevant today. Latino actor and comedian John Leguizamo created a portal website called UrbanoTV with the goal to provide entertaining online videos, pictures, blogs and other types of content with Hispanics in mind. The site offers a variety of videos that are uploaded by the video producers, which actually helps in promoting their shows and boosting online searchability. The shows range from talk shows, interviews, webisodes to regular video blogs all posted by members who have signed on to the site. What’s great about UrbanoTV is that it displays videos with expereinces shared by members of how life is like for a bicultural Hispanic living in the United States.
According to John Leguizamo, UrbanoTV is supposed to be the online entertainment outlet that Latinos have been looking for. His intent was to create a multimedia social platform that combines the concept of YouTube, Hulu, BlogSpot and Flickr with today’s Hispanic cultural elements. As mentioned before, UrbanoTV offers three types of video content that includes UrbanoTV original shows, premium user shows and professionally produced shows.
Current research and data analysis concludes that Hispanics are the fastest-growing segment of the US population, and marketing research site eMarketer expects the Hispanic online population to grow by nearly 10 million people between 2010 and 2014. eMarketer predicts that 32.2 million Hispanics, or 62.9% of the US Hispanic population will be online next year.
As you can see, the data shows that there is so much opportunity now to build innovative forms of online media that can capture the interests of young and tech savvy U.S. Hispanics and build online communities based on their biculture. Hispanic marketing researcher, Joe Kutchera, points out in his new book, Latino Link, that U.S. Hispanics are becoming fast adopters to online technology, particularly in both mobile and social media and right now is the the best time to utilize these technologies and I believe that John just happened to hit the jackpot.
