RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta has made its debut in the commercial advertising market for the first time in its 50-year history.
Under the station’s new strategy, it will sell advertising on its FM service as well as the Raidió na Gaeltachta website and on RTÉ Radio Player.
To date, the station has been funded largely by RTÉ’s license fee allocation. In 2022 this amounted to €11.6m, according to RTÉ’s most recent annual report.
The size of the market for Irish language advertising market is unclear. However the Official Languages (Amendment) Act 2021 requires public bodies to ensure that at least 20% of their advertising is in Irish, and that 5% of their advertising budget is allocated to Irish-language media.
As the only national full-service Irish-language radio station, RTÉ is hoping to tap into this as an income stream as well as opening up other commercial opportunities for the station.
In 2022, RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta spent around €10m on a range of programming, €9.8m of which was on in-house productions and €117,000 on commissioned content. The largest chunk of this, €4.8m, was spent on current affairs and news, according to RTÉ’s annual report for 2022. During the year, €1.73m was spent on music programming while another €1.5m went to factual programming while €1.1m was spent on sports content.
“This is wonderful news for the sector, building on the great work that RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta has been doing over the last 50 years,” says Gearóid Mac Donncha, Ceannaire, RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta.
“The support from advertisers will assist us in enhancing our content offering, and contribute to the development of new, modern infrastructure, with the goal of better serving the audience of today and tomorrow,” he adds.
“This is an important development for advertising in the Irish language,” says Gavin Deans, commercial director, RTÉ. “ I’d like to thank Gearóid and the team at RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, and my own team here at RTÉ Media Sales, for all the hard work and time invested in getting the infrastructure up and running to enable us to provide this service to our agencies and clients.”
