Batanga.com merges, goes downtown
The Business Journal Serving the Greater Triad Area
Batanga.com, an online radio broadcaster that was born at the peak of Internet mania and managed to thrive while the on- line industry collapsed around it, is merging with a fellow Spanish-language online firm and will move its headquarters to Miami.
Greensboro isn’t losing a dot-com success story, though, said Batanga founder and CEO Troy McConnell. He and Batanga’s 13 local employees will be moving only from the Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship to the Guilford Building on South Elm Street in downtown Greensboro, starting in January.
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Batanga began broadcasting multiple channels of Spanish-language music on the Internet in January of 2000 from Greensboro’s small-business incubator, and has grown steadily since. It has more than 1.5 million unique listeners per month, and McConnell expects to finish this year with about $3.5 million in revenue, mostly from online advertising from companies including McDonald’s, Verizon Wireless and DaimlerChrysler. The new company will continue to use the Batanga brand online.
Batanga and Planeta Networks have worked together for the past four years, with Batanga providing the online music service for Planeta’s Web sites.
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Hispanic Media will also launch two new content channels, Batanga Sports and Batanga Auto. McConnell said those sites are being built in partnerships with Spanish-language publishers Sportsya. com and Megazines, and will offer both text and broadband video. Both new channels will be linked from the main Batanga.com site.
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Batanga has always been one of my favorite sites, an online radio station that lets you choose the type of music you want to hear. Definitely worth taking a look.
