Peter_Rosado said:
that article is trash, the majority of spanish speakers are A: in Spain and B: in the USA or Canada and speak English as well. Central and S. America have the second lowest internet connection per capita ratio in the world (africa is the lowest)
The article quotes an AOL/Roper study but does not quote the geographic or demographic sample of the study. Did the study ask for spanish speaking only? Did it only target teenagers who speak spanish since their parents do? The information is vague at best and cluttered with real world brick and mortor sales figures. I do my research since that is my living and every other study on internet usage has shown that S and Central America's connectivity rates are highly flawed and only near 1-5% of internet users.
For instance that article quotes MexGrocer.com... oh wait their site is in english by default with a tiny link to the spanish version. Obviously going all spanish or even spanish by default is not something this site feels is good for their bottom line, and they have good reasons to believe that.
Also many times the figures for Brazil get tossed in with the rest of S. America although Brazil largely speaks Portugese not Spanish. Notice how the article does this a little ways down. Brazil has a very high connectivity rate comprable to the US, Korea and European countries. They added it's figures in to make the rest of the market look better, but again they don't speak spanish and dislike being included in the hispanic market. Make a site for them and call it like carnivalearcade or something and it very well could explode.
Good luck with the sale and my apologies for posting this critique here, I thought it was a different area of the forums.
All in all offering a translated site is not a bad idea (i have one in tons of different languages), but when targeting a site to one language only you may run into some difficulties, especially spanish or swahili.
More proof:
Only two sites based in Mexico (largest connected spanish speaking only population) are in Alexa's top 1,000 sites. In fact the majority of the "big sites" for Mexico are American sites like MSN, Yahoo, Google (mexico), and Myspace.
More Mexican internet users access MSN.com than the spanish version MSN.es (MSN.com is #1, MSN.es is #21)
That mexgrocer is located at about 42,000 and the big site this post referrs too is under 100,000