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Agency ad spend boosts Rightmove profits

A surge in agents’ advertising spend helped boost Rightmove’s profit by 40% during the first half of the year.

The portal’s underlying profit increased to £27.9m in the six months to June 30 2010, up from £19.9m in the first half of last year.

It attributes this to a staggering 89% increase in spend on additional advertising products, which over half of all agents on the portal take and on which they spend more than £100 per month.

The number of new advertisers to join the portal in the first half of the year increased by 7% to 17,993, with the average spend per advertiser having increased by 20% to £365 per month, which compares to £305 during the same period last year, according to the portal’s interim results announcement.

Ed Williams, managing director, of Rightmove, says: “We continue to develop Rightmove for the benefit of home hunters and our advertisers. We now give our advertisers the opportunity to convey who they are, what they do and what they offer, in addition to promoting the individual properties they have on their books.

“Someone buying a home in the UK today is most likely to have first seen it on Rightmove. So how agents and developers choose to advertise on Rightmove can make a major difference to their business success. The impact of this additional spending can be clearly seen in the financial results we report today.”

The number of agency offices to have joined Rightmove during the first half of the year increased by 589 (4%) to 14,751, which helped increase revenue by 26% to £42.3m, up from £33.6m in the first half of last year.

In terms of site visitors, page impressions on Rightmove increased by 22% to 3.9bn, which is up from 3.2bn in the first half of last year, resulting in the portal's market share increasing from 80% to 82% of all impressions on the UK's top four property websites.

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