Fox News Latino Stays Strong & Plans More Video, Bucking the Trend of Mainstream Media Closing Latino Outlets
Fox News Latino is one of the earliest Latino-specific brands for a mainstream media conglomerate to come into existence, and it remains one of the most steadily-growing, while other Latino brands created by mainstream media have faltered. In an effort to expand its reach and content, Fox News Latino will begin adding more videos to its offerings.
Fox News Latino was launched more than three years ago and is still growing strong. It's actually one of Fox News' most reliable brands, as far as an expanding audience is concerned. The site had 3.6 million page views and 1.1 million unique visitors in 2013, according to ComScore (via MediaBistro).
In December of last year, the site had grown 40 percent in views over the previous month and beat its monthly average for unique visitors as well.
This is in the period when other mainstream media outlets with Latino-specific branding on content began to fail. In November 2013, NBC News announced it was shuttering its Latino brand on the web, NBC Latino, which quietly happened in mid-January this year. Soon after that, CNN Latino met the same fate, as CNN announced it's "bold effort to continue CNN's commitment to the U.S. Hispanic marketplace," would be off the air within weeks.
In stark contrast, Fox News Latino is planning on upping the content of its website over the course of 2014. According to MediaBistro, Fox News Latino's goal is to increase video production, perhaps in response to a new Nielsen Digital Consumer study, which found that Latinos in the U.S. were so remarkable in their new media consumption and use of the mobile web that they dedicated a spotlight in their report calling Latinos "Ahead of the Digital Curve."
That report found that Latinos in the U.S. are much more likely to own and use a "second screen" in addition to traditional television watching and are adopting smartphones "at a higher rate than any other demographic group," with nearly three quarters of U.S. Latino adults owning smartphones -- a full 10 percent higher than the average. Latinos, importantly to Fox News Latino, also watch streaming internet video on mobile and home devices more than any other demographic -- averaging more than eight hours of online video per month, which is over an hour and a half more than the general population.
Fox News Latino has steadily grown while other mainstream media outlets have found it rough going, opening new sections last year like "Money" and "Opinion," which, according to MediaBistro, features contributions from high-profile Latinos like Congressman Luis Gutierrez, former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and of course, Fox's own Geraldo Rivera. With NBC Latino out of the web space and CNN Latino ending its syndicated television programming, Fox News Latino is in a good position to expand its mainstream appeal with video content, though there is likely still a good portion of its potential audience that will never be interested in what Geraldo has to say. For them, there's always Latin Post.