Sometimes the big just keep getting bigger. This has traditionally been the case with Univision and their latest online moves are pretty big. The company already ranks as the top U.S. Hispanic property, almost double the users of the closest competitor.

Granted, Univision’s audience was slightly inflated during the month these figures were measured since their site began streaming World Cup videos on June 11. Therefore their current traffic might be closer to 2.5 million, a figure I’ve seen in some industry presentations. Regardless Univision is clearly in the lead and it will likely extend this position given a number of recent announcements:

• September 20: Univision launched 72 new local and mobile sites in top 20 Hispanic markets. Including this one for its owned and operated Miami station.
• September 23: Univision and the NFL announced the launch of a worldwide site (www.NFL.com/espanol) for Hispanic and Mexican NFL fans.
• October 7: Univision launched a new music site, Musica.Unvision.com.
• October 12: Univision and NBA announce a partnership for a new co-branded site with league content on Univision Interactive Media’s online platform.
• October 18: Univision anounces that VEVO’s music video catalog will be added to Musica.Unvision.com.

Most importantly, and probably instrumental in closing these parnterships, a significant deal between Univision and Televisa was realized whereby online content rights from the latter will finally extend to the former. As I explored in early 2009, Univision’s lack of these rights resulted in a large amount of pirated Televisa material on YouTube, something that was eventually policed during the ensuing year, probably as a prelude to this deal.

With the addition of NFL, NBA, Televisa and new music content, it will be interesting to see how much Univision’s traffic grows. Since Univision already reaches over 75% of the online Hispanic audience the effect might be greater in terms of engagement rather than unique users; popular long-form telenovela videos should considerably raise the time on site for their users. Video traffic also sell at higher CPMs and has strong growth potential- online video advertising grew over 31% during the first half of 2010 as compared to 2009.

At the 2009 Horowitz Media Conference a speaker declared that Hispanic online video was a wide open opportunity. It seems to me that with Univision’s announcements this sector will be catching on fire during the next year, and will likely attract a lot of attention and further investment, both in the form of advertising and new ventures, something that should be beneficial not just to Univision but to all participants in the online Hispanic market.