Today you
may be in the mood for some clips of Fergie or Akon; tomorrow you might want to
listen to songs by Tego Calderón or Sin Bandera. Online media and entertainment
company Batanga aims to provide you with all of your music and music
videos—especially if you happen to be Hispanic and living in the United States.
If you
fall into that demographic and haven’t yet heard of Batanga, the company’s
Series C round of $30 million, announced Monday, will likely go a long way
toward reeling you in. The round was lead by Tudor Ventures and HIG Capital.
“We
believe we have a unique space for that consumer and it is the consumer that is
fastest-growing online in the US,”
said Batanga Chief Marketing Officer Rick Marroquin.
Mr.
Marroquin said his company’s site is the only startup successfully competing in
the media space against larger corporate groups such as Univision, AOL Latino,
and MSN Latino. He added that Batanga also functions as a bilingual counterpart
to radio streaming sites such as Last.fm and Pandora because it offers content
from a plethora of English and Spanish-speaking artists on a site that can be
read in either language.
In
addition to streaming radio, Batanga offers music videos, and produces concerts
at "high-density Hispanic colleges," such as the University
of Miami, Hunter
College, and the University
of California, Los Angeles.
But the
Coral Gables, Florida-based company has a long way to go before it achieves a
monopoly among its target population. For one thing, Mr. Marroquin said Batanga
gets 4.5 million unique visitors every month, but only 1.5 million of those are
based in the United States,
where there are more ad dollars to go around. The other 3 million logon from Mexico and Central and South
America.
Still, Mr.
Marroquin said Batanga has procured advertising partnerships with General
Motors, Ford, McDonalds, and a variety of movie studios.
Batanga,
which was founded in 1999, also has to overcome a bit of less-than-rosy demographic data that could diffuse Mr. Marroquin's optimism about the online market potential of Hispanics living in the U.S.
According to a March report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, only 56 percent of Latinos in the U.S. go online, compared to 71
percent of U.S.-based non-Hispanic whites and 60 percent of non-Hispanic blacks. Only 29 percent of Latino adults have a broadband
Internet connection required by media-rich sites such as Batanga.