The state of HispanicTips and its future

HispanicTips is about to reach two milestones. It will complete it’s third year at the beginning of July and will reach 40,000 posts/items this week. Do you realize how big this is, what a valuable resource it is? Yet, something rather important is still missing – financial stability.

Now before I go on, I want to say that about a year and half ago I was quite vocal about the site’s financial situation, ran a sponsorship drive and honestly wrote about the ups and downs . While the drive helped raise some money, it didn’t come close to providing a firm footing for the site. In the end, I simply shut my mouth and stilled my fingers because I received feedback from some that said that I wouldn’t be able to get advertisers interested if they thought the site might be ‘unstable.’ So I shut up and worked harder and kept going.

I have been quiet long enough. The sudden closing of the Los Angeles based Tu Cuidad magazine brought that home to me. What happens to those who like something and then one day it just vanishes. Not that I fault the magazine, I am simply using them as an example. I represent new media. I want you to know my story, my situation so that one day you won’t wake up and find me gone. It is part of the story of HispanicTips, of Hispanic media of Hispanics in media.

It would be so easy for me to give up, remove the site and disappear, but I don’t want to nor do I have plans to do this. That isn’t the way I do things. Instead, I feel that keeping you informed not only of Blogante news but of how HispanicTips is doing would be healthier than keeping silent. That is the reason I have decided to write this. I want an open line of communication between you and me. Perhaps there is an entrepreneurial/image risk in doing this but keeping my mouth shut hasn’t worked wonders for me yet.

So the question is (and I ask it of myself daily), how can I make HispanicTips financial stable? I have no doubt that it can be, but I still don’t have an answer other than to provide the best service possible and at that I truly do succeed.

I have become an aggregation master and created an aggregation masterpiece. With my laptop, cell phone and an internet connection, I can create something wonderfully useful and unique. There is no other site or person that covers a single diverse subject as well, in my opinion. You should be as proud of HispanicTips as I am for it really is a jewel of a site and it is a valuable resource that deserves financial stability as well as prosperity.

I have several honest questions that some of you may want to answer.

• Why haven’t Hispanic/Multicultural ad agencies, marketers embraced HispanicTips and other Hispanic blogs? I find it curious and would love to hear some honest answers.
• Do you think that HispanicTips can’t be a financially successful business? Is the model wrong?
• Is the fact that HispanicTips is in English part of the problem? Hispanic media seems connotes Spanish media.
• If you were able to creatively partner with HispanicTips in some way what would you do, how would it look, what would be the benefit to both?
• If something as useful, relevant and respected as HispanicTips can’t attract advertisers what is the future of other Hispanic internet startups and blogs?

I will leave you with this. HispanicTips isn’t going anywhere but up (at least in my dreams and not up in smoke). If I can do all of this on less than a shoe-string budget, imagine what I could unleash given the proper resources? One day I pray you will be witness to the creative entrepreneurial and beneficial ideas that lay stored in my head.

• Gustavo Arellano in profile in Tu Cuidad