Thursday, January 10, 2008

"Property" is back



The importance of property advertising to the Irish Times is plain to see. Ever before the company bought MyHome.ie the newspaper's revenues from property advertising were clearly very important to its bottom line; and since its €50m purchase of that property advertising website, the dependency has intensified.

With this in mind, today's banner headline 'Property Is Back' is a loaded one. It is, of course, referring to the supplement, which is called just Property, being back in the fold of the paper after the Christmas holiday period did away with (as it always does) any chance of selling enough property advertising space to justify a separate print process. But it is funny that they chose such a direct way to announce the return: Property is Back (more important than Clinton v Obama! and nearly as important as THE IRISH TIMES title). Even in the same important location on the page, they could have put it differently: Property Supplement Back, or even "Property" Is Back. But, instead they allow the reader to do a double-take and think for a second they're saying, maybe, Property is back in fashion (after a slump in interest), or perhaps even, The property market itself is back.

It would be a nonsense claim to say that the Irish Times property supplement IS the property market. Of course, it's not true in any numerical sense in that the specific readership profile of the Times limits the percentage of the total market that is represented in the pages of the supplement. However, in a looser sense the claim is at least partly true - a very important niche of the Irish property marketm (one which has an influence on the other levels of the market) is almost totally conducted through & dependent on the pages of the supplement.

Of course, that's not necessarily a problem. It's a really good read, Property in the Irish Times, and we all know it's not a forum for reporting or even independent thought on the property market; and also the revenues are put to good enough use (in my opinion, at least) in that it's a damn good newspaper all round for a country our size. But, one would hope that

1. The property market could cope without the Irish Times (Surely ...)
and
2. The Irish Times could survive without property advertising (Hmm, you'd wonder, especially with it carrying the MyHome.ie purchase ...)

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