El Sitio

» see elsitio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the spanish-language web of 1999 was not my web. by then i was fifteen in ankara, on dial-up that ran through ttnet, with a browsing diet of donanimhaber and the english-language news sites a high-school student could read with school-grade english. either way, el sitio sat in the latin american corner of the dot-com boom that turkish trade press did not really cover. close enough, the name showed up in international tech wires only when the nasdaq ipo happened in december 1999.

el sitio was founded in 1997 in buenos aires by two argentine entrepreneurs, roberto vivo-chaneton and roberto cibrian-campoy. the pitch was a pan-latin content portal serving spanish and portuguese-speaking markets out of one editorial operation. anyway, the model was the same one yahoo and excite had used in the us: news verticals plus free webmail and chat, with banner ad revenue against eyeballs. the gap was a regional one. latin america did not yet have a portal at that brand scale.

by 1999 the company had editorial teams in buenos aires, sao paulo, mexico city, miami. close enough, the headcount crossed 500 ahead of the nasdaq listing. the operation was burning around $30 million a year, the pitch to investors was that latin american broadband would unlock the ad market on a five-year horizon.

~ the dossier ~

~ the ipo ~

for whatever reason, el sitio went public on the nasdaq stock market on 10 december 1999 under ticker lcto. the offering put up 8.2 million common shares at $16 per share, raising approximately $131 million. either way, the bankers were salomon smith barney with merrill lynch on the syndicate. the trading opened above $40 inside the first day. by the close of the dot-com euphoria window in march 2000 the market cap was being talked about in the high hundreds of millions.

the listing put el sitio alongside starmedia and terra as one of the recognized pan-latin internet companies of the moment, with yupi the smaller comparable on the same wires. for whatever reason, the market cap was a forward bet rather than a present-revenue valuation. anyway, the trade press of late 1999 was bullish on a latin american internet decade that did not quite arrive on the timeline anyone was modeling.

~ the merger ~

this part you had to be in the region for, and i was not. the dot-com bust hit fast. by march 2001 the stock was trading below $1, and the nasdaq had threatened delisting on the standard minimum-price rules. for whatever reason, the rescue path that the founders pursued was a merger with ibero-american media partners ii, a holding entity backed by venezuelan grupo cisneros and dallas private-equity firm hicks, muse, tate & furst. the deal closed on 21 september 2001 and the new combined entity was renamed claxson interactive group, with ticker xson on the over-the-counter bulletin board.

the claxson combination was structured as a media-and-internet rollup. el sitio's portal assets were folded into a broader portfolio that included television and radio plus pay-tv operations across the argentina, brazil, chile and mexico footprint. close enough, that combination was where the el sitio brand effectively stopped being a standalone product. it became a content vertical inside a larger media group.

~ what it left ~

for whatever reason, what disappeared was the most ambitious argentine attempt at a pan-latin portal at venture scale. starmedia had the new york base and the larger headline number on its ipo, but el sitio carried the regional editorial bench. either way, by 2005 the founders had moved on to other ventures, the elsitio.com domain was bouncing through claxson redirects, and by 2020 the site was no longer accessible at any meaningful address.

el sitio sits with starmedia and yupi on the short list of latin american portal-era ipos that crashed inside the same eighteen-month bust window. anyway, the inheritance is mostly a sec filing trail and a few news-archive snapshots. the operation that was supposed to be the pan-latin yahoo did not survive the moment the public markets stopped funding portals.

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