A lack of funding, erroneous strategy, fierce competition, insufficient web traffic and other market factors have forced the shutdown of VOXXI, three years after its launch.
The English-language site targeting second and third generation Latinos is still live, but hasn’t been updated in about two weeks. It will eventually disappear from the online space.
VOXXI’s co-founder and majority investor, Salomón Melgen, under investigation by the FBI and at the center of the corruption scandal involving Sen. Bob Menéndez, decided to no longer pump money into the website.
Without Melgen’s financial backing and limited advertising revenue, VOXXI management had been trying to find new partners or buyers since last year.
They were unable to find new investors. When sale talks with a potential buyer fell through, parent company La Vox, LLC had no choice but to pull the plug on the venture due to lack of revenues to continue operations.
At its peak in June and July of 2014, VOXXI was attracting an average of one million unique monthly visitors with about 2.5 million pageviews. But that number soon dropped to about half a million monthly visitors.
The site’s staff had been dwindling for the past couple of years. By the time it stopped content production about two weeks ago, VOXXI only had about three staffers, including Managing Editor Daniel Lastra.
VOXXI was run by Emilio Sánchez, the site’s President and CEO. Just prior to launching the site in November of 2011, he took a three-year leave of absence from his job as U.S. Hispanic Managing Editor at Agencia EFE.
He returned to work for EFE last year and is now Director of Business Development for its U.S. division.
