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For Yahoo Newspaper Consortium Members, Targeting Is Now The Draw, Not Job Ads
For websites still joining ad alliances like the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium and quadrantONE, the appeal is in the targeting and ad assistance—not the job listings. For the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, HotJobs was initially a main selling point, but with unemployment currently at 9.1 percent, job ads aren’t so hot these days. None of the five new consortium members have signed on for the HotJobs service. Instead, the newspapers all cited a desire to access Yahoo’s targeted inventory and online ad saleforce training.
The consortium’s members have been awaiting the rollout of Yahoo’s APT display ad targeting and distribution service, which has been slower to materialize than they expected.
Since Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took her post in January, the company has been aggressively looking at which parts of Yahoo’s portfolio it needs to prune. So far, the fate of HotJobs, which Yahoo bought in 2002, remains uncertain. One option is for the newspaper members to buy HotJobs and divide the revenues among themselves. While a jobs site might not seem too attractive for struggling newspaper companies right now, when the economy turns around, online recruitment could be lucrative again, especially in the case of an established brand like HotJobs. Still, among the big three—Monster.com and CareerBuilder being the other two—there is likely to be some consolidation when the economy turns around. And far from writing HotJobs off, Yahoo sources tell us that the company is planning to roll out some new tools for the jobs site designed to help users deal with issues related to the recession. The company declined to offer details about the new HotJobs features, but said the goal was to make it more appealing to newspapers and to users in general.More after the jump
As Outsell’s Ken Doctor told me, recruitment traditionally offers the highest margins of all newspaper classifieds, although help-wanted ads have been down more than 50 percent year-over year since Q408. The expectation is that these great losses will finally slow by the latter half of the year. “Yahoo HotJobs is a key online sales category for news publishers, increasingly being sold on its pure online value and less on its bundled value, a transition that makes sense given job placers and job seekers acceptance of the web as the go-to ad medium,” Doctor said. “Given the jobs environment, it’s harder for news companies to justify an immediate investment in buying HotJobs, given how constrained their cashflows are. Yet, given its longer-term strategic fit, it makes sense.”
HotJobs does have some selling points. For example, it had 17 million users, per Comscore (NSDQ: SCOR), in April, making it the number two jobs site behind the Tribune-, Gannett-, McClatchy-owned CareerBuilder’s 23 million monthly uniques. Right now, selling HotJobs would provide a quick cash infusion and fit with Bartz’s strategy of getting Yahoo to concentrate on its core. Still, a number of original consortium members have said that they have some concern about what the loss of HotJobs would mean to the alliance, though most acknowledge that they could still use the service no matter who owns it. As a rep for Freedom Communications, one of the newest consortium members, told paidContent earlier today, the publisher will maintain its agreement with HotJobs’ rival Monster.com and will not sign on with the Yahoo jobs site. “Our agreement is about giving content on Freedom sites more visibility, and utilizing APT to help advertising customers experience a better return on their investments,” said Freedom rep Eric Morgan.
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paidContent.org
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For Yahoo Newspaper Consortium Members, Targeting Is Now The Draw, Not Job Ads
For websites still joining ad alliances like the Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Newspaper Consortium and quadrantONE, the appeal is in the targeting and ad assistance—not the job listings. For the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium, HotJobs was initially a main selling point, but with unemployment currently at 9.1 percent, job ads aren’t so hot these days. None of the five new consortium members have signed on for the HotJobs service. Instead, the newspapers all cited a desire to access Yahoo’s targeted inventory and online ad saleforce training.
The consortium’s members have been awaiting the rollout of Yahoo’s APT display ad targeting and distribution service, which has been slower to materialize than they expected. Yahoo sources tell us that the company is planning to roll out some new tools to help get newspaper members in the interim; the company didn’t offer any additional detail about those tools.
Since Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz took her post in January, the company has been aggressively looking at which parts of Yahoo’s portfolio it needs to prune. So far, the fate of HotJobs, which Yahoo bought in 2002, remains uncertain. One option is for the newspaper members to buy HotJobs and divide the revenues among themselves. While a jobs site might not seem too attractive for struggling newspaper companies right now, when the economy turns around, online recruitment could be lucrative again, especially in the case of an established brand like HotJobs. Still, among the big three—Monster.com and CareerBuilder being the other two—there is likely to be some consolidation when the economy turns around. More after the jump
As Outsell’s Ken Doctor told me, recruitment traditionally offers the highest margins of all newspaper classifieds, although help-wanted ads have been down more than 50 percent year-over year since Q408. The expectation is that these great losses will finally slow by the latter half of the year. “Yahoo HotJobs is a key online sales category for news publishers, increasingly being sold on its pure online value and less on its bundled value, a transition that makes sense given job placers and job seekers acceptance of the web as the go-to ad medium,” Doctor said. “Given the jobs environment, it’s harder for news companies to justify an immediate investment in buying HotJobs, given how constrained their cashflows are. Yet, given its longer-term strategic fit, it makes sense.”
HotJobs does have some selling points. For example, it had 17 million users, per Comscore (NSDQ: SCOR), in April, making it the number two jobs site behind the Tribune-, Gannett-, McClatchy-owned CareerBuilder’s 23 million monthly uniques. Right now, selling HotJobs would provide a quick cash infusion and fit with Bartz’s strategy of getting Yahoo to concentrate on its core. Still, a number of original consortium members have said that they have some concern about what the loss of HotJobs would mean to the alliance, though most acknowledge that they could still use the service no matter who owns it. As a rep for Freedom Communications, one of the newest consortium members, told paidContent earlier today, the publisher will maintain its agreement with HotJobs’ rival Monster.com and will not sign on with the Yahoo jobs site. “Our agreement is about giving content on Freedom sites more visibility, and utilizing APT to help advertising customers experience a better return on their investments,” said Freedom rep Eric Morgan.
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New (Lower) Odds For A Microsoft-Yahoo Deal
The new consensus on Wall Street about a possible Yahoo-Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) deal: Not so likely. In a report Tuesday, Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal puts the odds of a deal at 50 percent, down from 80 percent. He says that the likelihood of a deal has gone down in recent weeks—with disagreements over price and also “operational aspects/deal structure.” (Not to mention that Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) CEO Carol Bartz has straight out said that her company would be “cleaner and simpler without a Microsoft connection”).
Aggarwal’s view is significant because, as Eric Savitz at Tech Trader Daily points out, he has been saying for months that a deal was imminent. Of course, while he may be lowering his odds, Aggarwal is not saying a deal is completely off the table. He notes that even with its Bing search engine relaunch, Microsoft won’t get the share needed to “remain sustainable/meaningful in search.” That largely mirrors the view of Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney, who said in a report of his own Monday that while a deal with Microsoft was “very unlikely near-term,” Yahoo remained the only target left for a company that wanted to build up scale in the online advertising market.
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Musictoob Launches Linking Tool For Bloggers; Brings On First Outside Investor
Pop music news and gossip site Musictoob thinks it has found a way for some aggregators to get around accusations of stealing content. The site has launched a new tool that lets any blogger link to outside stories, which then show up under the blogger’s URL but are still hosted on the site of the original publisher. Musictoob says that both the blogger and the site he or she links to register page views (A small frame also shows up on the top of the page. Click on the thumbnail to the right for an example). “Everybody who comes to the party gets rewarded,” says Michael Rovner, the general manager of Musictoob. “It’s actually loading—it’s not us stealing page views.” Musictoob is using the service, which it calls the Tuna Platform, on its own site—and it’s also now giving it away for free.
If it catches on, plans are in the works for a paid option for “power users and corporations.” The benefits are obvious for bloggers (who can keep visitors on their sites for longer) but less obvious to those being linked to who might not want to share their page views, although Rovner insists they’ll be okay with it because they’re still getting hits. (He contrasts that with a service like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader, which uses a site’s content but doesn’t necessarily bring it page views—or traditional frames—like the ones that generated controversy for Digg earlier this year—which he admits basically “hijack” a site’s traffic).
It’s far from Musictoob’s core business—producing music-related content—but Rovner said the company developed the Tuna Platform internally while “we were playing around with different ideas” and decided it might as well distribute it. He added that six-month-old Musictoob.com is “thriving” despite the recession. The company generated its first profit in April—and just brought on its first outside investor, former *AOL* U.K. marketing chief Tobin Ireland. The site brings in revenue via ad sales and also an events series. It’s also syndicating some content to Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music and is beginning to make some video content it hopes to sell to big media outlets. The company is also adding some big names to its board including former HMV (LSE: HMV) CEO Robin Miller.
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paidContent.org
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Musictoob Launches Linking Tool For Bloggers; Brings On First Outside Investor
Pop music news and gossip site Musictoob thinks it has found a way for some aggregators to get around accusations of stealing content. The site has launched a new tool that lets any blogger link to outside stories, which then show up under the blogger’s URL but are still hosted on the site of the original publisher. Musictoob says that both the blogger and the site he or she links to register page views (A small frame also shows up on the top of the page. Click on the thumbnail to the right for an example). “Everybody who comes to the party gets rewarded,” says managing editor Michael Rovner. “It’s actually loading—it’s not us stealing page views.” Musictoob is using the service, which it calls the Tuna Platform, on its own site—and it’s also now giving it away for free.
If it catches on, plans are in the works for a paid option for “power users and corporations.” The benefits are obvious for bloggers (who can keep visitors on their sites for longer) but less obvious to those being linked to who might not want to share their page views, although Rovner insists they’ll be okay with it because they’re still getting hits. (He contrasts that with a service like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Reader, which uses a site’s content but doesn’t necessarily bring it page views—or traditional frames—like the ones that generated controversy for Digg earlier this year—which he admits basically “hijack” a site’s traffic).
It’s far from Musictoob’s core business—producing music-related content—but Rovner said the company developed the Tuna Platform internally while “we were playing around with different ideas” and decided it might as well distribute it. He added that six-month-old Musictoob.com is “thriving” despite the recession. The company generated its first profit in April—and just brought on its first outside investor, former *AOL* U.K. marketing chief Tobin Ireland. The site brings in revenue via ad sales and also an events series. It’s also syndicating some content to Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Music and is beginning to make some video content it hopes to sell to big media outlets. The company is also adding some big names to its board including former HMV (LSE: HMV) CEO Robin Miller.
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paidContent.org
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