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April 23, 2007

MySpace Launches Site For U.S. Spanish Speakers

Michael Arrington

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More than 28 million people who live in the U.S. speak Spanish as their first language (U.S. Census, 2000). They now have their very own version of MySpace at latino.myspace.com.

Before today, Internet users in the U.S., the UK, Japan, France, Germany, Australia, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Canada, New Zealand and Mexico had access to localized versions of MySpace. Users were redirected based on the location of their IP address. With Latino.Myspace.com, users can choose to simply go to that site instead of the U.S. version.

MySpace also launched la.myspace.com, a pan-regional site for Latin American Spanish speakers.

These localized versions of the service don’t prohibit people from different MySpace sites becoming friends. Anyone can be friends with anyone in MySpace, even if they use different MySpace sites and speak completely different languages.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, April 23rd, 2007 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. wayne lambright

    April 23rd, 2007 at 9:57 pm

    Interesting, are there any ad networks like federated media that focus exclusively on marketing to the Latin community?

  2. Sean

    April 23rd, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    Wow, now that’s on the forefront of technology. What next, google.jp?

  3. John / SocialNext

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:25 pm

    I think it’s a great move to foster a sense of community among US spanish speakers but it’s probably to create a more targeted environment for advertisers.

    MySpace is fantastic at segmenting it’s users for advertising. So far it hasn’t driven it’s users away in the process.

  4. nicko

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:29 pm

    Spanish localizations are a complete waste of time if you want to monetize anything. They don’t spend/have much money. We localized our software, german is ok, spanish was a waste of time. Of about 6,500 unit sales so far this year, only a handful are spanish and we’ve had the spanish version for 3 years.

  5. chrisco

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:30 pm

    yawn… myspace is boring and commercial from a user’s point of view, at least after the initial excitemet wears off, which is pretty quick.

  6. Top Grubs

    April 23rd, 2007 at 11:31 pm

    I wonder how much more traffic/users they can add by introducing this new Latino version!

  7. John

    April 24th, 2007 at 12:52 am

    Are you kidding me…. What so big deal about it? I see no innovation…
    Where’s?!?!

    How hard is translate english to spanish on line?

    Here use this existing online technology.
    http://www.worldlingo.com

  8. smokey

    April 24th, 2007 at 1:09 am

    slutty latino chicks are the biggest demographic of myspace…this is to cater them…

  9. KiLotr

    April 24th, 2007 at 3:02 am

    @ John. one thing is to translate the site as many others, other different is to recreate the full site for a determined audience, I don’t really know if this is a great idea, but anyway it will definitely bring more users to the site.

    its a different thing to go to a social club where ppl speaks english and some of them spanish and go to another one where everyone speaks it.

  10. pallet jack

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:38 am

    honestly what took so long?

    Myspace in Spanish (forever ago!)
    http://babelfish.altavista.com.....ace.com%2f

    Myspace in japanese:
    http://babelfish.altavista.com.....ace.com%2f

    - Sometimes people re-invent the wheel

  11. Sandro

    April 24th, 2007 at 6:51 am

    A complaint here: I do no understand why they name spanish versions of websites with a latino…. I’m Brazilian and born in Latin America, however I do not speak Spanish. I do speak Portuguese, like +150 million in Latin America. So I feel a URL like spanish…. more appropriate.

  12. Jenn

    April 24th, 2007 at 9:19 am

    nicko…Just from my experiences advertising to the US hispanic/latino community, I know for a fact that MySpace will be able to profit on this endeavor because they can charge premium rates for banners and such as right now the Hispanic community is in high demand.

    As to the actual site, MySpace is behind the times on this one (check out Quepasa) and may not be authenthic event to get Hispanic/Latino buy in.

    http://www.quepasa.com/espanol/

  13. Jazzy Singh

    April 24th, 2007 at 1:17 pm

    well they can just sign up at surogo.com they don’t need latino myspace :)

  14. ajadoniz

    April 24th, 2007 at 8:30 pm

    lol @ nicko. Ever heard of marketing?

  15. Curtis

    May 11th, 2007 at 8:29 am

    “We localized our software, german is ok, spanish was a waste of time. ”

    Based on one experience (who knows how well you guys did this, or if your product is any good), all Spanish localization is a waste of time. Gotcha.

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