In the United States, more than one in five people speak a language other than English at home. One in 10 Americans are also Spanish speakers, and a large portion also speaks Portuguese. And yet, a surprisingly small amount of sports media outlets create and/or curate content specifically for this audience.
Marcos Araujo, founder and CEO of Esportudo, set out to change this when he launched the media company for only the most passionate Latino fans.
A son of Brazilian immigrants, Araujo grew up a big basketball and soccer fan. As with most millennials, he consumed content related to his two favorite sports via mobile devices and other technology. Particularly a fan of the Brazilian national soccer team, Araujo noticed there weren’t many American media companies distributing content covering the team (or many other sports) in Spanish and Portuguese. Araujo founded Esportudo in 2016 with this principle in mind: connect Latin-American and Latin fans all over the world with their favorite teams through personalized content.
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Esportudo brings fans tailored content from a variety of news sources and outlets based on location. Fans in New York will see New York teams, for example, and fans in Mexico will get content covering El Tri and Mexican club teams. The app can also be personalized for a user’s favorite teams.
As far as the content itself, Esportudo offers original content as well as aggregated content from top global news sources and content creators. As of now, Esportudo is pushing out over 3,000 pieces of original content per month while delivering another 233,000 to the user. Its original content goes beyond just articles, as Esportudo engages with its users through quizzes, polls, podcasts, and other social-driven content.
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With original content, Araujo and his team also try not to retread the same topics that other outlets are already covering. He explained they attempt to add something on top of widely-circulated news stories, giving their content that extra value.
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“We allow these users to personalize and select which topics they want to follow,” Araujo said. “We take what’s being creating today and what’s been trending on social and try to put something that’s more in-depth on top of it. (Our content) makes people think about it in a little different of a way.”
This strategy is paying off for the young media company, which has generated an audience of over 600,000 unique monthly users on the app — with a total reach across all social platforms of 25 million people. Araujo takes pride in the community that Esportudo has been able to build in just a few short years.
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“I think that’s always going to be a challenge for any media company — continuously building the community and making it stronger. There are a lot of companies that have a whole lot of impressions and a lot of funnel-type engagement, but not too much deep engagement. We pride ourselves a lot on the quality of our content. What’s important is that we try to really interact with our users.”
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Moving forward, Araujo and Esportudo plan to make their expanding offering for Spanish speakers an even bigger priority.
“There are 600 million Spanish speakers in the world, which is double the amount of English speakers. So it’s a massive, massive demographic and no one is really focusing on creating an amazing sports platform for them. We’re really trying to fill those shoes.”
The Esportudo mobile app is available for download on the iTunes App Store and Google Play.
