Digital entrepreneurs turn to mobile for users, revenue

Leo Prieto:betting on "mobile first"

Versión en español aquí.

Leo Prieto is a digital media entrepreneur in Chile whose 10 communities attract an audience of 10 million users a month from all over the Spanish-speaking world.

Late last year, his company, Betazeta, decided to go "mobile first" and optimize the design of all its sites for mobile devices. More than half their traffic comes from mobile.

"Mobile phones are always with us," Prieto told me in an interview via Skype from his office in Santiago. "On the street, at home, we check them every two minutes, a hundred times a day."

And now that social networks like Facebook and Twitter are getting as much as three-fourths of their traffic from mobile devices, digital media publishers can see growth in social traffic by optimizing for mobile. "It's a virtuous circle with the social networks and mobile devices," Prieto said.
 

In hyper-connected world, you have to be everywhere

Versión en español aquí.

At 3:34 a.m. on Feb. 27, something shook Leo Prieto awake. His apartment in Santiago, Chile, was in total darkness. 

Nothing worked except for his cellphone. He sent out a message on Twitter: "What the heck was that?" In no time at all, Twitter crackled with messages from all over Chile with stories of serious injuries and collapsed buildings.

Evidently there had been a massive earthquake, and Prieto began to share messages with other Twitter users via his cellphone. In less than half an hour, CNN in Atlanta recognized Prieto as an unofficial hub of information and sent him a tweet asking for his cellphone number.

How to sell advertising without selling your soul

(Versión en español aquí.)

Fayerwayer is one of the most popular blogs in the Spanish speaking world because of its frank and conversational commentaries about the latest gadgets and software. 

Its founder, Leo Prieto, of Santiago, Chile, tells an instructive story about how the blog's first advertiser created controversy among his collaborators and the blog's loyal followers. (photo from www.endeavor.cl)

Prieto started Fayerwayer (a phonetic spelling of "firewire" in Spanish) in 2005 because he was dissatisfied with what he saw as a lazy, mindless rehash of press releases in most technology blogs and print publications. 

He decided he would actually try out the products and services and see if they were as described by the public relations and marketing specialists.