It’s disappointing what passes as a revolution these days.

Fairfax Media declared it was revolutionising the New South Wales and Queensland classifieds industry by combining its classifieds brands – MyCareer, Drive and Domain – with the print classifieds of regional-based publihsing group APN.

Fairfax says the move will extend the reach of APN’s classifieds (which operate in the regional areas of those two States) to a national audience while impriving its own reach through regional areas.  

“This exciting new alliance gives Fairfax Media and APN clients in Queensland and Northern NSW the ability to access a bundled print and online advertising solution that has been very successful for our clients in other States,” CEO Brian McCarthy said.

“It will boost listings and traffic to allow us to compete even more effectively against other real estate, jobs, and motor vehicle web sites.”

The news was picked up by the press (a partnership between two print houses is always going to get press) but the real story was that Fairfax also announced its half year profits today. And Fairfax’s books might be better termed revolutionary – particularly as McCarthy had turned a loss of A$375.6 million for the same period last year into a profit of $A143.5 million.

Interestingly, the market did not seem to think that this spectacular turnaround in Fairfax’s fortunes was that revolutionary with the company’s share price rising just two cents on the news to close at $1.805 at the end of the day’s trading.  

In part this is because the Australian advertising market has turned and, while it did record a 9.2 per cent increase in revenue, as economist Stephen Bartholomeusz points out, its December figures also revealed only a 2.5 percent increase in advertising volume from the depressed levels of a year earlier.

Most of the increase in Fairfax’s earnings, Bartholomeusz says, can be attributed to Fairfax cutting its base and is not the result of Fairfax ruthlessly capturing market share.

Speaking of which, SEEK boss, Paul Bassat, claimed last week that Fairfax’s position in the employment classifieds market had suffered so horribly over the past year that its MyCareer brand now accounted for only 13 per cent of Australian employment classifieds.  

Bassat said that SEEK had consolidated its position with around 64 percent of the market, while News Ltd had captured 23 per cent of the market through its CareerOne brand, now partnered with Monster. The conclusion was simple: Fairfax’s only hope was to join forces with its most bitter rival, News Ltd, or face oblivion.

While it might sound extreme, it wouldn’t be the first time that Fairfax and News Ltd have gone to bed together. In the auto classifieds market Fairfax’s Drive shares its listings with News Ltd’s Cars Guide, the only way the two can compete with runaway market leader CarSales.com.au – a company which, like SEEK captured market share largely because of (rather than in spite of) its ties with traditional media.

In fact, the only classifieds market where Australia’s big two media houses continue to slug it out against each other without a third wheel is in real estate listings. And, there again, News Ltd-backed REA Group trounces Fairfax’s Domain. Its realestate.com.au website enjoys 4.6 million unique visitors a month (Google Ad Planner: Feb 2010) compared to domain.com.au’s 2.4 million (Google Ad Planner: Feb 2010).

That said, Domain seems to be making steady ground on its rival (Nielsen pegged it as having just 1.9 million unique visitors a month in August 2007) and Fairfax has worked hard at making its site as useable and intuitive as it can (the same can’t always be said for its high performing rival). However, any in-roads Domain can make into REA’s market position might come to nought, now that Google has stated its intention to become a legitimate player Down Under through Google Maps.  

All of this talk of competition and market share and of a Fairfax struggling to make its mark might draw a big ‘so what?’ from our international readers. But for Australians, coming to terms with Fairfax’s fallen status is the real revolution – almost as dramatic as the fall of the Berlin wall in its own less important way.

In recent history Fairfax has been the undisputed king of Australian classifieds: the listings pages of its flagship publications The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were so lucrative they were popularly known as “the Rivers of Gold”. Media mogul Kerry Packer, who died in 2005, tried his whole life to dip his hands into those rivers (ultimately unsuccessfully).  

Now Fairfax, like most traditional media houses, is just another player – a big one, no doubt, but no longer a market leader in any single one of the four main arms of classifieds (real estate, employment, auto and general).

It will take another real revolution to restore Fairfax to its former glory.