cuonda, the independent podcast community for Spanish people !

We believe journalism’s future will be shaped by entrepreneurs who develop new business models and innovative products and services. Some will build startup news organizations, while others will develop disruptive projects within large media companies.

The City University of New York

In 2015, at the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism in CUNY (City University of New York), Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, a startup was born that would make a difference in the podcasting for Spanish people and its name is…Cuonda!

Along with the support and a grant from Google Digital News Innovation Fund 9DNI Fund), Cuonda right now has 1.164 followers in Facebook, 3.175 in twitter and 412 in Medium and it’s indeed the podcast platform for the Hispanic community globally.

The founders are ana ormaechea, media consultant, journalist and founder of TabletArmy, Luis Quevedo, scientific journalist, Pablo Juanarena, radiophonist and Angel Jimenez, technology editor.

“We are creating the first community focused on solving problems that have so far hindered the growth of podcasting among Spanish speakers, articulating a market for quality content and sustainable business models”.

What is Cuonda?

Cuonda is not an app. Neither a web service.It was born as a project to try to unify the different markets of Hispanic podcasts and take advantage of that union to improve its diffusion and sponsorship. We believe that there are several problems that hinder the dissemination of Podcasts in Spanish today and that we can solve them by creating a strong community around them.

So, which was the pain they wanted to relieve?

Spanish language podcasters must face three problems:

-The audience is highly fragmented, by countries and platforms.

-A lack of standardized metrics.

-Discoverability of new podcasts is extremely hard.

The gain

Cuonda is where independent podcasters can grow their audience and reach better sponsorship deals by using standardized and aggregated metrics, a simple and unified hosting, cross-promotion and help from other podcasters.

How (did) they do it?

At first you have to create a guide that highlights the content created by the different Hispanic podcasters. Right now there is no canonical index that allows searching or highlighting the content that hangs on the network.

The second is to create a commercial network to make it easier to seek sponsorship. If you have a podcast and want to have advertisers, Cuonda will help you find them by adding audiences from different programs. A company may not be interested in advertising a podcast of 3,000 downloads, but in several simultaneously whose audience adds ten times that amount? The answer is yes.

Finally, they want to promote the creation of a clear metric system, which will allow us to know exactly the audience, regardless of the services that are chosen to house them.

I have the opportunity to speak and write in Spanish and thanks to the master program I participate and this group in Medium, that Betty Tsakarestou is in charge, I did get to know Cuonda, listen to the podcasts they offer (there are an abundance of topics and themes from history to fiction, from art to sport) and appreciate even more the podcasting per se as a means of communication and a significant and creative asset in journalism, advertising, acting etc.

I wish all the luck to Cuonda. It forms a a great example of a startup initiative that managed to grow and flourish, keeping their promises to their (potential) audience and at the same time maintaining their goals and quality!

Cheers!

• If you can even understand Spanish or you are a Spanish learner, you really need to subscribe to the platform right now.
• In 2018 the 5-podcast series of the journalist Pablo Romero, won the Best Podcast award in Premios Ondas, Spain’s most long-standing and prestigious radio and television awards!