Posted: January 17th, 2010 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Innovation, International | No Comments »
The following is a preview to the forthcoming book – The Spanish Net: How to reach and segment the 136 million Spanish-speakers online – from Paramount Books.
How can we develop great content online for the Spanish-language world in the years ahead? Much like the Madrid-based blog networks in my previous post, we can answer this question by looking to one of the leaders of publishing in Spain: Gumersindo Lafuente, who founded SoiTu.es, a truly innovative content portal, previously ran the newspaper site ElMundo.es and as of January, 2010 became a co-director of ElPais.com.
Mr. Lafuente feels that news organizations must do a better job of integrating information and technology to figure out new ways to distribute and consume content. This is why he hired programmers to work in-house to develop SoiTu’s own back-end systems including their content management system, ad server, and UTOI, a Twitter-for-journalists that could scan text, suggest tags and create a better way to organize journalistic information. From the readers’ perspective, SoiTu offered search tools by keyword, theme and date and fully integrated social media style commenting, encouraging users to register on the site.
Here, you can see SoiTu’s weather, lottery, soccer and skiing widgets that they developed for consumers to use in iGoogle, Apple’s dashboard, on blogs or wherever you want to include the code. (However great RSS is, Mr. Lafuente admits that the vast majority of users don’t set up a custom RSS page on Google Reader.)
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Posted: April 27th, 2008 | Author: Joe Kutchera | Filed under: Blogging, Innovation, International, Reviews, Trends | No Comments »
During my week in Madrid, I visited Gumersindo Lafuente, the founder and director of a brilliant Spanish-language site called SoiTu.es (or roughly “I am you” in English). Even while it provides up-to-date news and tons of helpful/interesting blurbs and links to other sites, it really excels as what I would call a “user-generated content portal” with content written by both their editors and a growing pool of volunteer writers who submit stories or comment. Note: the readers are truly engaged in participating in and making the site. Their channels provide something different and truly interesting when compared to newspaper sites or portals. They include: environmental news/issues, urban life, digital life, trends, sex, health, wheels (cars, bikes, motorcycles, etc), design and architecture, videos, and tons of blogs.
Gumersindo told me that in March, only three months after launching, they reached 500,000 unique visitors. While the majority are from Spain, many also visited from Mexico and Argentina. Pretty impressive. Aside from the content, the color-coded channels, design and overall feel work very well. His approach to advertising is also unique. Instead of putting the word “publicidad” (or advertising) above the banners, he places a small logo above all the banner units that says “I (heart) Publi,” or “I love advertising.” His plan is to integrate the media kit into a blog about advertising so that visitors who click on the “I (heart) Publi” logo will visit SoiTu’s advertising blog.
Prior to starting this company, Gumersindo ran one of the leading newspaper sites in Spain, ElMundo.es, which has about 11 million unique visitors per month. Good news to see entrepreneurs leaving great jobs to start even better web sites.
Here is a photo from my visit…
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