THE announcement yesterday that Kate Middleton is pregnant  shines a light on the question we've battled with for years: Do we really care about the royals?

Some online comments yesterday suggested the pregnancy was barely newsworthy, while other folk were in  a lather over  the prospect of a squeaky-clean little wrinkly royal.

Magazines both here and abroad will be throwing everything they have at reporting every sneeze with the slightest of  Kate connections over the next nine months, and the first photo of that royal baby bump will undoubtedly sell millions.

Yesterday's big news attracted a wealth of traffic for sites such as ours, which suggests we may just be a nation of closet royalists.

So let's have the discussion. Are the royals relevant to Australia?