Yahoo! & Telemundo split is good for Hispanic online marketing
When Yahoo! and NBC’s Telemundo announced a partnership in May 2006 to jointly develop, maintain and market YahooTelemundo.com, I thought it was a great idea on paper. At the time, Univision.com ruled among Spanish language websites targeting US Hispanics. Univision.com offered deep, culturally relevant content, a solid search partnership with Google and perhaps most importantly, the ability to promote the site through Univision’s vast television and radio empire.
The Yahoo! and Telemundo Hispanic online partnership represented a formitable competitor to Unvision.com
A Yahoo! Telemundo alliance was a perfect answer to this reality. On the one hand, Yahoo! brought technology prowess and a large Hispanic online audience to the table. Couple that with Telemundo’s (and NBC Universal’s) strong content and offline reach, and according to one insider, you have “an unbeatable platform for advertisers to reach the largest and most engaged U.S. Hispanic community online, on-air and on the go”, or so they thought.
History has shown that even the most promising partnerships on paper are difficult to bring to life. I am sure that several factors, none of which I will speculate about here (although your comments on the reason for the split are welcome), contributed to the divorce of Yahoo! and Telemundo. From my perspective, what is important is that at the end of the day, the two year partnership and recent split up is good for the Hispanic online marketing industry.
The spit of Yahoo! and Telemundo will yield two high quality Hispanic websites
As I have written before, there is a lack of high quality Spanish language content online which limits opportunities for Hispanic online marketers. However painful and costly, I am sure that executives at both Yahoo! and Telemundo learned a great deal about the emerging Hispanic online audience and the Hispanic online advertising landscape, learnings that will pay dividends for both parties in the future. In January 2009, YahooTelemundo.com will emerge as two quality Hispanic websites, both of which should be strong players in the Hispanic online marketing industry. Yahoo!’s Hispanic online portal will go back to being Yahoo! en Español while Telemundo will become Telemundo.com (with some help from Microsoft, but this is for another post). This in turn will create more content for online Hispanics and greater opportunities for Hispanic online marketers.
I wish my friends at both Yahoo! and Telemundo the best of luck!