Why Doesn’t TechCrunch Cover Latin America?
An in-depth look at TechCrunch’s forgotten region
As a startup I’m always eager to pitch my news to the big tech publications. And while I’ve gotten notice in Mashable and VentureBeat, TechCrunch US always bypasses my news. Now, I understand that reporters are insanely busy and people like Sarah Perez get thousands of emails per day, but this thought stayed with me. Reporters like Anna Heim from The Next Web, Dani Fankhauser from Mashable, and Eric Johnson from Re/Code (before being at All Things D) very nicely interviewed me when I launched my startup, but TechCrunch never responded — or if they did, my pitch was turned down.
Is it me? Naturally I assumed Wideo was not a big enough pull for TechCrunch and happily stayed in touch with the other reporters. But now, two years after my launch, I’m realizing…it’s not me — it’s them. So I took a deep dive into TechCrunch to see what was really going on — and what I found is that TechCrunch simply does not cover Latin American startups.
For my research, I typed every single Latin American country into the TechCrunch search bar. Then I typed “Latin America” to see if there were overarching stories. I eliminated all the articles that listed LatAm countries that startups also launched in (ie: highlighting a startup in the US with plans to launch later in Chile — unless Chile was prominently featured, which it rarely was). This is what I found:
In the past 3 years, TechCrunch US wrote 38 stories on Latin America.
38. That’s probably what they publish in a day. In the ‘About’ section, TechCrunch says:
TechCrunch is a leading technology media property, dedicated to obsessively profiling startups, reviewing new Internet products, and breaking tech news.
What they don’t mention is they obsessively profile US and European startups — putting in the occasional company coming from Asia or Australia. They certainly are not obsessed with Latin America.
Ironically enough, TechCrunch hosts ‘Latin America Invades TechCrunch Disrupt’, where Latin American startups are invited to man booths at the Disrupt event. Having attended the event, it’s interesting that TechCrunch has a LatAm pavillion, but the startups certainly do not disrupt the front page of the website.
But wait, TechCrunch just published a piece on Foreign Startup Founders’ Financial Barriers. They profiled startups from Australia, the Middle East, and Europe. But…I have financial issues as well going to the US — are mine less important because they came from Latin America? Apparently so.
My Biggest Question is WHY.
Why does TechCrunch ignore Latin America? It can’t be the language, because most founders from here are bilingual (and many speak more than 2 languages). Could it be LatAm isn’t booming? Because between the investments, Brazil’s economy, and the startup hubs that are forming here, it seems pretty interesting.
So, I’m left wondering — why TechCrunch? Why don’t you care about startups from Latin America? This Quora question asked that exact thing, but it seems no one came up with an answer.
So now I pose it to the Medium community: Why is TechCrunch largely ignoring LatAm?
This blog is by Agu De Marco, Co-Founder of Wideo, a DIY animated video production platform.
