Latinas Spittin' Wicked Rhymes - Company Business and Marketing - Brief Article

Industry Standard, The, Sept 11, 2000 by Daniel Helft

Loquesea.com attracts Latin America's hippest hipsters. But is that enough?

ASCRAPPY LITTLE COMPANY PROM Venezuela is generating some of the loudest buzz in Latin America these days by catering to hip youths often overlooked by the region's mainstream Internet and media companies.

Loquesea.com takes its name from a Spanish word that typifies the cool indifference of youths who often shrug their shoulders and say loquesea, or "whatever." The racy site dishes out an unabashed mix of sex, fashion, TV and movies, and claims to have the largest collection of games and free MP3 music in the region.

The site's founders, Carlos Lizarralde and Adriana Lozada, launched it last year as a music site and soon developed it into a broader subculture site with brash columnists, chat rooms and e-mail. From a ramshackle office in downtown Caracas, where sassy 20-year-olds manufacture much of the site's attitude, Loquesea has become one of the most popular sites in the region. Its monthly pageviews rank ninth among sites based in Latin America, according to a joint report by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter and auditor Alexa Research.

Loquesea is still behind mainstream heavyweights such as StarMedia, Terra Networks and Brazil's UOL. But it has broken into the top 10, even though it's spent only about $10 million. That goes over well with its backers, which include Merrill Lynch and Seagram's Edgar Bronfmann Jr.

Those investors are attracted by the fact that Loquesea is one of the hottest sites in the sweet spot of Latin America's online demographic, which is forecasted to grow from 10 million today to 30 million by 2003. About 40 percent of the market consists of the 15-to 29-year-olds Loquesea that targets.

Appearance is critical to that age group, and 29-year-old Lozada provides the appropriately chic public face for the company. As chief creative officer she oversees content and writes her own column on issues ranging from virginity to Japanese poetry.

Lozada embodies the global youth culture Loquesea taps into. Born in Venezuela, she spent part of her childhood in the United States, attended college in Canada and lived in Japan for a year on an exchange program. "Wherever you are from, issues are the same," she says.

Loquesea is active in seven Spanish-speaking countries and the United States, where it addresses the Hispanic market in Spanglish, a hybrid of English and Spanish. A recent story titled "Latina MCs in Da Casa" read: "Latinas aren't content just to provide the curvas and the came for rap videos, they're spittin' wicked rhymes too."

Knowing when to be local and when to be global has helped Loquesea garner more Latin American traffic than multinationals such as MTV and local rivals such as Brazil's Zoyd.

But ad revenue started to trickle in just this summer. CEO Lizarralde insists Loquesea is on track to bring in $2.5 million by the end of the year and says it will be in the black on $20 million in revenue in 2001. Those targets are optimistic but attainable, says Will Landers, Latin American Internet analyst with Credit Suisse First Boston.

Loquesea has mastered youthful fads, but it's the profit fad on Wall Street that really matters. And as many flashy dot-coins have learned, making profits is much harder than creating buzz.