Rene Alegria de MundoNow
The media company MundoNow (Atlanta, Georgia) was founded 43 years ago as an independent Latino newspaper in Atlanta under the name Mundo Hispánico and in 2004 it was acquired by Cox Media, which in 2015 decided to go digital (online) increasing its popularity.
“Cox decided to sell the outlet in 2018 and I was part of the Latino investment group that acquired Mundo Hispánico,” explained René Alegría, CEO; so the outlet returned to being owned and operated by a minority group.
2019 was the first year that the company was recognized with a digital media Emmy Award (before the recognition was only for TV companies). “We produce a lot of videos, that’s our strength. We won eight Emmys that year and since then we’ve won 16 in three years,” he said.
“We specialize in custom branded content,” he pointed out, adding that being in Atlanta is a great advantage since the region is considered the Hollywood East. Many production companies and television stations record in Georgia due to the tax incentives they grant to entertainment broadcast companies.
MundoNow has worked with brands such as Rocket Mortgage, Crest, Verizon, Toyota, Wells Fargo, NFL, Macy’s, Chase JP Morgan, and LALA, to name a few. “The content production unit became our cornerstone after we acquired the company in 2018,” he emphasized. Colombian filmmaker Diego Silva is the leader of the unit.
By 2021, the company decided to become more relevant to second and third-generation Latinos. “We felt that we were not representing the community as a whole because the acculturation and demographic of Latinos has changed in the last 10 years and has accelerated in the last five years. To be more relevant we began to publish content in English in 2021 and it began to find its niche. In 2022, we rebranded MundoNow so that it would be bicultural, bilingual, digital, better representing our community,” Alegría explained, adding that now they can ‘connect and move” Latinos who prefer Spanish and those acculturated Latinos who prefer English.
MundoNow reaches 10 million users on Facebook, as well as on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube (570,000 monthly followers) and has some 55 million page views per month with 8.5 million unique users.
They also launched a Latino podcast network called Óyenos Audio last January. Daphne Wahabi is in charge of the content, she comes from Univisión’s podcast area. “In the two months that she joined us, we already have 10 shows in different categories ranging from true crime to health. The total number of downloads of our podcasts is 1.5 million and still increasing,” Alegría said.
He indicated that their entire ecosystem is now made up of video, social media, audio, digital, and print – because they still print their newspaper.
“I have found that very little attention is placed on the entrepreneurial nimbleness of minority-owned tech companies like ours. So oftentimes we are overlooked, even by our own Latino media, in favor of giant corporations that dip into our Latino market only to pull the plug far too early on their half-hearted Latino initiatives. Thankfully, everything is changing for the better. And MundoNow’s success is a symbol of this,” he concluded.
