By Lex Davidson

Today, Duncan Riley’s, The Inquisitr, announced that AOL is launching heavily into the fast growing latin market by creating separate destination site for each country with regional news, weather IM and email.  This is following FOX’s latin-centric advertising network expansion earlier this year.  I had time to speak with the SVP of FOX’s latin division, Hector Costa, who said that consumer knowledge and online engagement in latin countries is growing at an expanding rate.

And it is not just technology and media firms entering the market, earlier this month, Vidshadow, the online video platform provider, announced that they were enabling the video on the official Julio Cesar Chavez website with both their video player and advertisements.

So why are the latin market?  There were 15.7 million Hispanic Internet users in the US in 2005, according to eMarketer. This total rose to 16.7 million in 2006. Increasing at a rate of 25%, nearly 21 million Latinos will be online by 2010. This means that by 2010 the number of Hispanic Internet users will approach the number of African-American users, making Latinos the fastest-growing minority group in the US to adopt internet use. According to a Pew Study, second generation Latinos or acculturated Latinos adopt internet use even faster.

“Younger generations of US Latinos as well as second-generation Latinos coming of age currently in the US have not been exposed to some of professional boxing’s true legends,” said Brian Weymouth, President of Julio Cesar Chavez Enterprises. “With an all-time winning streak of 90-0, Julio Cesar Chavez is indeed one of those legends that will inspire Mexicans and all Latinos in the US and abroad. And now, thanks to Vidshadow, his millions of fans worldwide can relive his most triumphant moments in the ring again and again, even as they follow the budding careers of his sons, Julio, Jr. and Omar. La leyenda sigue – the Legend continues!”

Many of these latin countries are not developed to the point where they can develop their own technology, which poses an interesting opportunity to platform providers and latin focused ad networks that are domestically based.  And this appears to be a very timely era for expansion into these nations.