Mr. Harry Browne:

Typically, for the larger newspapers in Ireland, advertising traditionally through the period of boom and for many years before that had been something like two thirds to 75% of the revenue stream of the newspapers. Fundamentally the business of newspapers is selling readers to advertisers and, to a smaller extent, selling newspapers to readers. In the memoir of a former editor of a national newspaper, he referred to research done in his newspaper and that two thirds of the advertising revenue was property and recruitment which were roughly equally spread. Recruitment is not to be overlooked and was a source of a vast area of relationships with the financial industry, in the same way that the property sections reflected relationships with estate agents. The recruitment sections, to a great extent, represented relationships with finance as well as with other industries.

For example, in 2001 there was a huge downturn in advertising revenue in newspapers, in particular The Irish Times, which was based fundamentally on a fall in recruitment rather than problems in the property market. If one breaks it down, two thirds plus of revenue in newspapers comes from advertising. Of that, two thirds comes from recruitment and property together. One gets a broad picture of the situation. If one looks at the steady rise of that through the boom and then the collapse since, one gets another sense of how important it has been to newspapers.