Advertisers are taking note of migrants' preference for websites in their own languages over newspapers, writes Ruadhán Mac CormaicMigration Correspondent.
FOR IMMIGRANTS and the advertisers who covet their attention, the move from print to online media has accelerated in Ireland in the past year, according to one of the country's biggest publishers of migrant media.
Niall Kehoe, managing director of Ethnic Media Ltd, which handles advertising for 16 print titles and more than 140 websites in migrants' own languages, says the online market has been growing in multiples and predicts the pattern will continue.
This reflects a wider trend among the young, he says, but it also owes something to the nature of the emigré experience. "Migrants get far better value from every €1 spent if they go online," Kehoe believes.
"They can use e-mail, social networking sites, they can exchange pictures with their family or check the results of their local soccer team, which the mainstream media - particularly print media - won't give them."
Ethnic Media was born five years ago when Kehoe was perusing the shelves at Eason's on O'Connell Street, looking for a gap that might need plugging. He thought of ponies. He plumped for Poles. Or, to begin with, the Chinese. "I was looking at all the different magazines, and I realised there was nothing on the shelf for anybody who didn't speak English," he says.
"They were all just aimed at our own domestic market, but because it was in O'Connell Street, there seemed to be an inordinate amount of Chinese around at the time."
The result was Tiao Wang, a Chinese monthly that Ethnic Media still publishes. But in the past five years the stable has grown to include four Polish titles, two Lithuanian papers and one each from Russia, Pakistan, Latvia, the Philippines and Africa. ( Metro Éireannand Polska Gazetaare among the few publications not linked to the group.) Most are independently owned, with Ethnic Media sourcing advertising from large organisations (banks, mobile operators, the PSNI, the Road Safety Authority) with an interest in speaking to young migrants.
The company also has deals with popular websites in Poland, Lithuania, China and elsewhere, allowing it to sell advertisements that are visible only to visitors based in Ireland. On the Chinese chat site irelandbbs.com, there are 68,000 registered users in Ireland, with a "massive upsurge" in traffic between midnight and 5am.
"When you think about it, it's not that odd," says Kehoe. "The Chinese tend not to be in construction - they tend to be in catering, so that's when the working day finishes for many of them."
To reach consumers such as these, Kehoe believes advertisers will need to refine their techniques a lot more - which might mean fewer Chinese advertisements on buses to Dalkey and more awareness of special dates in the Polish or Lithuanian calendars, for example. "I think this year it will bed itself down and people will start homing in on exactly what type of foreign nationals they're looking for. Whereas last year, it was just 'let's do Polish', 'let's do Lithuania', it's now become more distilled, more refined. The catch-all just doesn't work."
Companies such as Ethnic Media face a paradox, however. They require migrants who intend to settle (and thus keep on spending) in Ireland, but they also need their readers to retain enough of their own identity to seek out a newspaper or website in their own language and stick with it. How long will the readership remain loyal?
"I still think there will be a market for media in their own language," Kehoe replies.
"That's on the basis that they don't completely Celticise themselves. I think migrants have a very strong sense of their own identity.
"The Irish in New York read the Irish publications, and the Irish in London read the Voice or whatever it happens to be. It's a way to keep in touch.
"I still read the local Wexford newspaper even though I don't know anyone in it any more."