Two relatively new and, judging from Circle.am statistics, highly popular Armenian online news websites: News.am and Tert.am added Turkish language versions to their content in October.
The Turkish language archive of News.am dates back to October 1st, while Tert.am seems to have started Turkish language publications on October 20th.
A colleague from Turkish Today’s Zaman newspaper contacted me last month asking for contacts and information on this new trend of Turkish language content on Armenian news sites. I tried to help as much as I could and was curious to see what would the resulting article be like. Well – I daresay, it’s very interesting! Here are a couple of extracts, the full article is here.
Sonya Apresova, an editor from Tert.am, said they have 12 percent growth each day in page views of the Turkish section of the site and that their visitors are not only from Turkey, but also from Armenia, the United States and Europe, especially in Germany, where about 2.5 million people of Turkish decent live.
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Hagob Avedikian, editor-in-chief of Azg, said they have been publishing a Turkish site along with their Armenian, English and Russian portals since the establishment of their Web page six years ago.
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Avedikian also said they have been encouraged to expand their Turkish site since they’ve received an advertisement from a Turkish fragrance company which is seeking partners in Armenia.
Developments regarding Turkey-Armenia relations have helped to increase Azg.com’s Turkish readership, he said. Their daily number of hits on the Turkish site was about 180 before the Oct. 14 soccer match between Turkey and Armenia in the northwestern Turkish town of Bursa. But a day after the game, they received about 350 hits.
“This is a good development, that people want to know what Armenians think,” he added.
This is certainly a clever idea by the Armenian media to try and involve new markets, expand their readership and promote Armenian thoughts and ideas where it’s especially necessary as diplomats in Armenia and Turkey keep twist-diplomatizing and confusing everyone over the border opening and normalization of relations issues.
And even though some speculate, that unlike “Azg” newspaper, which has traditionally had the Turkish content, the newcomers in this: News.am and Tert.am are only serving a direct political order from Armenia’s Presidential palace and should be criticized for this, I see nothing wrong in providing more Turkish language Armenian content. Do you?
If I were a Turk, I would approach this content with a grain of salt. The same way as I would approach Armenian language content in Turkish media. Ultimately, it’s all done for propaganda and the selected items on these sites will be geared towards that. And if it’s done in a clumsy way, there will not be any credibility to it.
Interestingly, as far as Alexa.com statistics are concerned, up to 40% of internet traffic to the two mentioned sites comes from Azerbaijan. With Turkish language content, they might manage to also increase the share of Turkish visitors, its no more than 3% at the moment on average.
There is nothing wrong in knowing your enemy’s language, the more the better actually, in times of war it was even helpful, I ‘d say it is even recommended for Armenians to learn Turkish…