Esmas.com

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

~ the obituary ~

esmas's world was mexico city in the early 2000s. televisa, the dominant spanish-language broadcaster in the americas, wanted a portal that could attach the network's tv promo machine to the new household internet connection. esmas.com launched in 2000 as that attachment. i was on the other side of the world, in turkey, on a 56k connection where the closest local equivalent was the early ttnet portal and the mynet horoscope page.

the product was a kitchen-sink aol-shaped offering for the mexican household: a shopping section, classifieds, a dating channel, horoscopes, chatrooms, celebrity fanclubs that tied to televisa novelas, branded webmail. the architecture was the same architecture that yahoo and starmedia were using in spanish across the region, with msn copying both. the only difference was that esmas had a primetime telenovela block to push it.

in 2004 televisa launched esmas movil, the mobile entertainment arm, selling ringtones and novela alerts to the early mexican feature-phone market, with chat services bolted on the following year. mobile-monetized media was a real revenue stream for latin-american broadcasters in that window. esmas was running the same playbook that mtv and globo were running in their own regions.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the mid-2000s were esmas at peak. the portal benefited from televisa cross-promotion and from the slow arrival of broadband across mexican households, which meant the audience was new every quarter. fan communities for telenovelas like rebelde and la fea mas bella moved through esmas chatrooms in volumes that televisa could measure against the on-air rating.

the structural weakness was that televisa was running an aggregator brand against forces that did not need an aggregator. google was about to take the horoscopes and webmail flows in any spanish-speaking market that adopted gmail. facebook landed in mexico in 2008 and pulled the fanclub layer onto a social graph that did not need the televisa promo to seed it.

~ the long tail ~

esmas did not have a single shutdown date. televisa rolled features off the portal piece by piece between 2010 and 2017. some properties were folded into televisa.com. the news section migrated to noticieros televisa. the telenovela coverage moved to lasestrellas.tv as the canal de las estrellas brand reorganized. by 2017 the consumer-facing esmas brand was a hollow shell, and the domain began redirecting into the newer televisa properties.

the redirect is the kind of grave that does not announce itself. there is no farewell page, no archive note. the url you remembered from a 2005 telenovela credit just routes you somewhere else now. for a portal whose entire job was to be the front door of mexican mass media on the internet, the slow fade into a redirect is a fitting ending.

~ what carried over ~

esmas mattered for the same reason starmedia and uol mattered: it taught a generation of latin american audiences that a major media company could meet them on the web. that is a lesson that lasts longer than any individual product. the people who built the esmas product later staffed televisa digital, claro video and the rest of the regional streaming generation. the portal vanished, the operational dna stayed.

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