The Latin Interactive World: El Mundo America

Earlier  this year, Spanish newspaper El Mundo launched the Americas Edition (https://www.elmundo.es/america/ ). The newsroom of the Americas edition  is based in Miami and led by Manuel Aguilera.

Aguilera worked for El Mundo TV (which like El Mundo is controlled by RCS Media Group from Italy). He convinced El Mundo founder Pedro J. Ramirez to open the Miami Americas digital edition. launched a digital edition oriented to the Americas (the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American markets.

There is no media on a regional level that meets the needs of the Latin American public, there is in TV, but not in the digital space”, Manuel Aguilera, El Mundo America’s director tells Portada. “Elmundo.es is a digital property with a high credibility in many countries. Often Latin American citizen view the media of their own country with distrust because national media properties can have economic interests within their countries and this influences their reporting, Aguilera adds. “Reporting and content from a neutral media property from Spain can be much more trustworthy”.

“There are some themes that touch all Latin audiences, regardless of the country they are in. They include sports, entertainment, economics and politics”, says Aguilera. He adds that entertainment and sports are, by far the most popular topics in terms of generating website traffic. However, politics and economics do attract an interesting audience from the advertiser’s perspective.

The Americas edition is divided in four sections representing geographic areas (North America, South America, Latin America and Caribe). An additional four sections are represented by Sports, Economics, Gentes. (Entertainment) and Blogs. Local Freelance journalists contribute regular articles from Latin America, North America and the Caribbean. The Miami newsroom is composed by 6 full-time reporters. The newsroom in the Madrid headquarters supports with additional content. Aguilera for instance notes that South Americans are very interested in how their soccer players are performing in the Spanish tournament (e.g. Uruguay’s soccer star Forlan and Messi from Argentina). It also goes the other way around with the sizable Latin American community in Madrid interested in reading what happens to their families on the other side of the pond. “We want to be a source of content for these immigrant communities”, Aguilera concludes.

Even before launching El Mundo Americas, El Mundo had a sizable audience in North, South America and the Caribbean countries. El Mundo.es has more than 23 million unique users a month of which approximately 4.5 million are based in Latin America and the U.S. Mexico almost has 2 million unique users a month, with the U.S. Hispanic market close to 700,000 unique users a month. Other important countries in number of Latin American unique users are Argentina and Colombia. In Argentina,  El Mundo ranks as the number 6 website in the news category.

According to ComScore, Elmundo.es has 4.5 million unique users in Latin America, less than the leader among newspaper websites Clarín.com, but more than its Spanish rival Elpais.com newspaper (2.2 million).

Newspaper Websites in Latin America

Note: Newspaper digital properties ranked by unique Users in Latin America, August 2009

Source: ComScore

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