Five years ago, NextBillion launched NextBillion en Español. The goal was to expand our coverage of the many social enterprise developments across Latin America and in other Spanish-speaking countries. In 2011, NextBillion started NextBillion Brasil, a site focused solely on that country and its exciting growth in market solutions to poverty.
At that time, NB’s growth strategy was to add sites focused on countries and/or regions. The two sites were an experiment to see if the regional approach could grow and ultimately sustain itself. But we increasingly encountered readers and content partners interested in supporting sites focused on more specific sector categories that cut across multiple regions. In response, we launched NextBillion Health Care in 2012 and NextBillion Financial Innovation in 2013.
The readership growth that we’ve experienced on NB Financial Innovation and NB Health Care tells us that, at least for now, there is greater demand among our global audience for industry-specific content related to a wide variety of regions.
For these reasons, we have decided to cease publication of NextBillion en Español and NextBillion Brasil as of today.
NextBillion.net will be archiving both sites’ content on special pages, and we’ll have links to share as soon as that process is complete. We remain dedicated to working with contributors across Latin America to bring perspectives, research and new developments associated with social enterprise and base of the pyramid best practices. And we hope our readers from these regions will continue to explore NB content – using online translation tools where possible – to follow and contribute new insights on the region. There is so much happening throughout Latin America, and we will do our best to capture it.
I also wanted to take this opportunity to thank our two regional editors, Jenny Melo, of NextBillion en Español, and Fernanda Tambelini, of NextBillion Brasil, for their hard work. They are talented journalists and editors, and their dedication can be seen throughout the pages of both sites.
Scott Anderson is the managing editor of NextBillion.
