Niche Media Pioneers: Webmaster cultivates Hispanic readers

Tomás Custer’s Web site, hispanictips.com, has become a popular information source, drawing more than 120,000 visits every month and wide-ranging praise.

Readers might expect that the creator and operator of the blog, which has banner advertisements in Spanish and English, is working in some hotspot of Hispanic culture like Miami or Los Angeles. But when Custer posts hundreds of links to stories every week dealing with the Latino community, he’s usually doing it from a laptop at Kaldi’s Coffee House in Columbia, which has a Hispanic population barely above 3 percent.

While Custer catalogues more than 100 news items four days a week, and has blogger’s credentials to the Democratic National Convention next month in Denver, he reluctantly calls himself a blogger.

“I consider [blogs] just a platform,” Custer said during an interview at Kaldi’s. Aggregation is the heart and soul of his business. There are two types of aggregation: automated and human, he said. “Aggregation is a big thing right now. Probably 90 percent of bloggers, I would call aggregators,” Custer, 39, said. “They grab niche content and comment some.”

The “creative entrepreneur,” as Custer likes to call himself, has divided the blog into different categories to deal with the amount of information he posts almost daily. Blogante Essentials is a category Custer said is the “real news.”

“If I had it my way, all the stories on HispanicTips would be Blogante Essentials. But people also want to read about sports and entertainment,” Custer said.

He also has categories for business, headlines and his own picks. For the Olympics, Custer created a separate category highlighting Hispanic athletes competing in China.

Custer said he’d like for more Hispanics to read the site. Hispanic news can be found in a wide array of sources, he said, and putting it in one place on the Internet is essential. “There are several reasons for this,” Custer said. “[Hispanics are] such a diverse group, and what news there is dispersed; the only way to deal with it is to aggregate it. Human aggregation takes more work but you get better results.”

The webmaster is also working on ColumbiaTips.com, a site that relies on automated aggregation because Custer doesn’t “have the money to hire an assistant.” Both Web sites are under the parent company Custer created in 2006, Niche New Media.

“Eventually, I’d like for ColumbiaTips to be a hybrid between automated and human aggregation,” he said. “[ColumbiaTips.com] is for anyone seeking a quicker way to stay informed,” he said. “All the information in there is in one package. You just click through to read the story.”

Custer links to some news on ColumbiaTips.com, as well as weather forecasts, community information, such as important city phone numbers, and links to the classifieds.

Custer realized he could have a lucrative business on his hands about two years ago, when he left his job as webmaster for the School of Education at the University of Missouri.  HispanicTips.com generates revenue from Google AdSense, Consorte Media, out of San Francisco, and Hola Networks, a portal advertising network. “I’d like to move in the direction of getting sponsors,” Custer said. “At times, I’ve had sponsors. At the beginning of the year, State Farm sponsored me.”

The kinds of advertising Custer gets on his blog are in English and Spanish. One banner ad is for Inglés Sin Barreras (English Without Barriers), a set of DVDs that teach Spanish speakers conversational English phonetically.  Other ads include a Lincoln MKX car advertisement; an ad in Spanish for a game where the player can win $10,000 in gas; and a Lifetime Network movie about a Latino mother and her daughter.

Custer said he never imagined himself as a professional blogger but added: “I’ve always tried to do my own thing.”

The Chicago native is the son of an American father and Mexican mother. He doesn’t speak much Spanish, but said he’s learning. He recently added news in Spanish to attract more Latinos to his Web site.

“Hispanics seem to face a burden of lack of communication and information,” he said. “But what you’re seeing is a reflection of Mexican media in America. I would like more Hispanics to be reading [HispanicTips.com]. I’d like to be a leader in providing news to Hispanics.”

So far, Custer has seemed to capture the attention of a few media professionals. Marisa Treviño, operator of the blog LatinaLista.com, said the aggregated news Custer provides is indispensable.

“He started about the same time I did; it’s gratifying to see how far he’s taken the site,” the Dallas-based blogger said. “I don’t want to give him any ideas, but I would be afraid if he charged for it. He has such a valuable service. It could warrant a subscription.”

The marketing director for La Palabra Latina (The Latino Word) wrote the site is easy and has the information she wants: “I found your Web site by accident, but I’m so glad I did!  I am the Marketing Director of a small (but growing) local Spanish newspaper (the only bilingual newspaper in our area) and I find the compilation of information invaluable!” Tara Grace-Ruiz wrote on Custer’s blog. “I don’t have a lot of time to browse the many, many articles that pertain to this rapidly evolving industry, but at HispanicTips, it’s all there for me.  The layout of the site makes finding pertinent information or specific articles very easy.”

Even Food Network star Ingrid Hoffmann, host of Simply Delicioso, had something to say about HispanicTips.com

“I find myself turning to HispanicTips for hard news and information of all things Hispanic and to be informed of what is happening in all our Latino communities around the US,” wrote Hoffmann in a testimonial on HispanicTips.com. “It’s a one stop shop for me as the coverage is so extensive and diverse. I can only begin to imagine the amount of work, focus and dedication that it must take to have so much fresh material every day.”

Media professionals aren’t the only ones who should care about what happens to HispanicTips, Custer said. “If people are interested in the business and economics of this country, they should be paying attention to HispanicTips. I would think that anyone interested in the future of this country would be paying attention to what’s going on with Hispanics in America,” he added. “The diabetes rate among Hispanics is going to cost us so much in the future. Drop out rates are another problem. These are huge issues with larger implications.”