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The student pound is becoming increasingly important as more and more sites are directed at the student market.
Over the last year a number of sites such as Flunk.net, Oxygen.ie Collegesweb.com and Campus.ie, all aimed specifically at students, have been launched. Banks are interested in capturing the influential student market too and see the Internet as a way of capturing the attention of the tech-savvy youth market.
Recently Bank of Ireland decided to get in on the student market with Autonom.ie, its student portal. Autonom.ie is a student-dedicated site, and is a move away entirely from the look and feel of the main Bank of Ireland site in tone, language and content in particular.
"The penetration of the Internet in the student population is enormous," Bank of Ireland's Dermot Nolan told ENN.
Nolan said that the beauty of it is that students like using the Internet as a medium of communications tool.
Caroline Reidy, youth marketing manager with AIB, also believes it is important to promote banking through the Internet to the youth market. She explained that the bank has a strategic partnership to promote lifestyle-based site Oxygen.ie through AIB as part of an incentive package. She said that it was more beneficial to AIB to partner with a site which already had the lifestyle content rather than AIB doing it themselves.
"At the end of the day we want to appeal to students in a way which appeals to them. Students are encouraged to use on-line and WAP banking," said Reidy.
Oxygen.ie content manager Cara Given said that that strategic partnerships are "the way to go", quoting recent survey results which indicate that 74 percent of young people have never clicked on a banner advertisement or claimed to have never noticed one. A further 53 percent of Internet users in the 15-24 age group say that they have never seen any advertisements on the Internet.
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