Marchex Inc. and Fox’s Latin American Channels division have teamed up to develop a set of Spanish-language Web sites owned by Marchex. Fox will provide localized content and community features including videos, forums, blogs, personal home pages, and photo albums to the Web sites.
The sites include Cocina.com, a cooking and kitchen site; Fotos.com; Futbol.com; Deportes.com, a news site; Mascotas.com, a site for pets; Mujer.com, a site for women; Peliculas.com, a movie site; Salud.com, a health site; and Tarjetas.com, a greeting-card site.
“We have always been interested in extending our strategy internationally,” said Peter Christothoulou, chief strategy officer of Marchex. “For us it has been a matter of sequencing, that is to say, what demographic do we target first and why.
“The Spanish-language demographic is one of the largest and fastest growing demographics online,” he said, “covering the U.S. Spanish-language market, Central America, South America and Spain, as there are more than 100 million Spanish-speaking Internet users worldwide, which in aggregate ranks it behind the U.S. and China.”
Marchex recently acquired more than 100 Spanish-language Web sites that collectively generated more than one million unique visitors in April.
Fox operates more than 50 Spanish-language Web sites, so this partnership helps to extend Marchex’s business internationally. This deal also gives advertisers another channel to target Spanish-speaking consumers.
According to Internet World Stats, the number of Spanish-speaking Internet users worldwide has increased more than 260 percent since 2000, outpacing the rest of the world’s usage growth by more than 25 percent over the same period.
In June, Marchex plans to re-launch more than 100,000 of its local Web sites by using its Open List content aggregation and publishing engine to populate selected Marchex Network Web sites with relevant content, including product and service descriptions, ratings, expert third-party reviews, user-generated reviews, articles, awards and maps .
“We think there is a big opportunity to execute upon our strategy of building useful online consumer destinations in this market and therefore create a powerful Spanish-language network,” Mr. Christothoulou said. “To that end we have partnered with Fox, a global leader in developing digital content and communities, to help us.
“Our understanding of operating Web sites at scale – and Fox’s local resources – we believe will help us address any unforeseen challenges,” he said.
