Monster has fallen off its leadership perch, hit hard by CareerBuilder’s heavy media spend and its extremely effective bundling of print/online ads. But by most counts, it is still fairly equal with CareerBuilder. It is certainly well ahead of Yahoo Hot Jobs, which made its own splash last week by teaming with 176 newspapers.
Monster has now asserted itself once again. In part, it is doing so by pushing very hard via a slew of deals with newspapers – an industry that it had recently scorned. It previously announced a deal with The Philadelphia Inquirer, and now has announced deals with The Orange County Register, along with several smaller papers that are also owned by Freedom; as well as with the North Jersey Media Group, and The Wilkes Barre Times Leader. The deals have been made by Peter Newton, who formerly led the development of bostonworks.com for The Boston Globe.
An executive close to the new signings said that it basically came down to working with Monster or Yahoo. So-called “White Label” solutions by various vendors were not really considered because they lacked compelling networks. Our source told us that Yahoo and Monster were fairly equal on basic listings, but Monster proved much more generous for upsells. Monster was also felt to be “better” than the others in terms of features, name recognition and prestige — although it could have gone either way.
“Monster is all about one thing: recruitment. We liked that focus. Yahoo is all over the map,” said our source, invoking the infamous “Peanut Butter” memo by a Yahoo exec that complained of exactly the same thing.
Indeed, Monster and one of the newspaper companies commissioned third party research to see just where the money would pan out in a strategic newspaper arrangement. The research revealed that there was very little duplicative advertising between the newspaper and Monster.
Another critical factor against signing with Yahoo was the centralized nature of the Yahoo deal, where everything was filtered via Media News Group. Smaller papers, apparently, weren’t invited to be part of the negotiation team.
Our source thinks the Monster deal was the best they could hope for, and added that the newspapers have been getting the gold treatment from Monster executives at the very top of the food chain. Monster is “dead serious about working with newspapers,” said the source. At the same time, the commissioned research revealed that Craig’s List and other social networks are making steady inroads into the marketplace. “Who knows whether Monster, CareerBuilder and Yahoo will even be a major part of this space in several years?” he said.
Peter: I wonder a couple of things related to this newly engaged recruitment battle:
1) Whether this move, which effectively breaks apart any hope of newspapers collectively working together on recruitment, is a harbinger of things to come. It’s easy to see the same kinds of splintering — with the aggregators picking off news chains in small groups or onesies. We can see apartments, cars, and traditional display/exposure ads following the same path. How fast, I wonder?
2) How fast the inroads of social networks in transacting people business — classifieds — will happen? We can count in the tens of millions of dollars the craigslist effect, especially in the Bay Area, as the site has sucked at least that much out of tradtional newspaper pockets? My sense is that the recruitment companies and their aggregator partners still have at least three years of high-margin revenues, as the craigslist effect and other similar phenomena deepen.
Anyone have a sense of how fast it will move?
2 Trackbacks
[…] The company had been engaged in the Yahoo talks all during the multi-month negotiation process, but wasn’t ready to sign up in time for the deal’s pre-Thanksgiving announcement. Two additional newspaper companies may also join the consortia. Only one of the original 12 companies involved with the talks, Freedom Newspapers, will definitely not be joining. It has chosen to go with Monster instead. […]
[…] Another early effort has been helping to break the industry’s cold war with Monster.com and signing up as a partner, instead of going with Yahoo Hot Jobs or pursuing an alternative strategy. “We are so impressed with them,” he said. […]