In its latest transitional move, AOL made its Spanish language portal available to Web users at no cost. The portal, called AOL Latino, was only available to subscribers who paid up to $26 per month for the service up until Monday. This move is another in the vein of AOL’s desire to offer most of its products for free in favor of aiming for an advertisement-supported business model.
AOL’s senior vice president, David Liu, said that AOL Latino’s free launch “represents another phase in the evolution of the U.S. AOL.com Web portal and extends our efforts to efficiently leverage our Web products, content, communities and services in a context that brings the most value to different segments of our users who share common languages and cultural bonds.”
A variety of standard features such as antivirus and spam controls, e-mail, IM, blogs, a photo service, calendar, as well as a handful of others will be made available on the portal in Spanish. Parental controls will be added to this stable in the near future. There will be a total of about 20 different Spanish language offerings on the portal.
AOL Latino already has partnerships with more than 15 companies, including the Latin Grammy Awards, Heineken, and American Express.
Enid Burns of ClickZ Stats says that about 55% of the total Hispanic population in the U.S. is online. This translates into in excess of 16 million Web users, 77% of which have access to broadband connections.
The Hispanic online population is expected to reach 18.7 million in 2008, and almost 21 million by 2010.
In addition to this, AOL’s Latino 2006 Hispanic Cyberstudy, conducted by Synovate, indicated that 68% of Hispanics make their final purchase decision online, and that 77% of them use the Internet to do research about products. With about $700 billion in purchasing power, the financial potential is nothing to scoff at.
This is clearly an opportunity that AOL is hoping to jump on, and with good reason. The population is young, and if AOL can gain a faithful following now, it will help them a great deal in their pursuit of an ad-supported model.
“U.S. Hispanic Internet users are the fastest growing community online, and what better way to tap into them than with a new free portal,” said AOL Latino vice president general manager, Ralph Rivera.
Though the potential financial boon is definitely present, the one major concern for AOL Latino should be how many Hispanics will be attracted to a portal just because it is presented in Spanish. AOL’s Hispanic Cyberstudy found that only 15% of the total Hispanic Web population prefers Spanish-only Web experiences.
AOL Latino promises to offer both bilingual and Spanish language programming, which should help it to attract a broader base of the Hispanic population, but the overall youth of the Hispanic population could mean that an increasing portion of it will be accustomed to English-based online experiences.
More endeavors to cater to the growing Latino market will only grow in prominence and frequency during the next few years.
Sources:
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/
index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20061204005476&
newsLang=en
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/topnews/wpn-60-
20061204AOLLatinoFreeToTango.html
http://www.marketingvox.com/archives/2006/04/13/
hispanics_to_catch_up_to_african_americans_in_internet_use/
http://www.adotas.com/2006/10/reaching-hispanics-
online-part-ii-aol-latino-publisher-mark-lopez-
takes-an-inside-peek-at-the-exploding-marketplace/
Digg 
