Job-Search Sites Face a Nimble Threat

Among the hottest Web sites of the past few years were job-search sites such as CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com. Helped by lavish advertising, they became household names. Newspapers, eager to tap the fast-growing online-ad market, teamed up with them.

Now, the hottest names in online recruitment are increasingly specialized job sites. That poses a threat to the growth prospects of the broad-based online job boards and their newspaper partners, analysts said.

In August, the number of unique visitors to CareerBuilder — which is jointly owned by Gannett, Tribune, McClatchy and Microsoft — dropped 2% to 20.2 million, while Monster.com’s traffic rose 4% to 16.3 million visitors.

By contrast, technology-focused Dice.com saw its traffic jump 34% to 998,000. At Healthcaresource.com, which posts health-care jobs, traffic rose 36%.

Of the broad-based sites, Yahoo’s HotJobs posted strong growth, with traffic rising 53% to 11.7 million visitors, boosted by recent partnership deals with more than 350 newspapers.

“Advertisers are increasingly looking for more-targeted audiences and better-reach sites where they can find candidates that are more qualified,” said Eric Yoon, chief executive of JobThread, which sells recruitment ads on dozens of targeted Web sites. In some of these cases, the cost of placing an ad is a fraction of a post on the big job boards.

Unless the newspaper industry and the big job sites figure out how to fill this burgeoning demand, they could lose market share, said Gordon Borrell, Chief Executive of Williamsburg, Va., research firm Borrell Associates. The market is valued at $5.9 billion but is projected to increase 25% to $9.7 billion by 2011, Borrell estimates. That growth is expected to come both from big companies already advertising online as well as small and medium-size local businesses that mostly don’t use the Web.

The big jobs sites are growing at a steady clip and they say they are making efforts to expand into both international and more-targeted markets. They have allied with newspapers as a way of gaining a local sales presence and a stronger brand name. The New York Times has been a partner of Monster.com, a unit of Monster Worldwide.

“Those have been successful partnerships for newspapers by giving them access to both a national audience as well as leveraging their own local sales and local audience,” said Randy Bennett, vice president of audience and new-business development for the National Newspaper Association.

Some employers complain advertising on broad-based sites generates too many unqualified applications, analysts said. New York online marketing firm 360i, for instance, said it has posted jobs listings on CareerBuilder and HotJobs with little results. “When we are looking for somebody to put a post up there…you get a fair amount of response, but not the quality,” said 360i Chief Executive Bryan Weiner. The firm hasn’t succeeded in hiring any senior-level staff from the broad-based sites.

“Obviously when you are going to a site that has a much larger user base you can get more applicants. You have more to choose from.” said a spokeswoman for CareerBuilder. CareerBuilder and Monster both note that employers can set multiple filters to weed out unqualified candidates.

“To ensure we always have the best talent in every region, across the county, Monster has relationships with several niche sites that target specific demographics. We also have added visibility in the regions touched by the local media outlets we have forged relationships with,” a Monster spokesman said.

Some Web concerns are taking steps to be more targeted in their approach. HotJobs has built an application on social networking site Facebook and is including tools on the site that enable people to email or instant-message a posting.

Yahoo is creating systems so recruitment ads on HotJobs could appear on other Web sites, using techniques that target the ad according to a person’s interests. For instance, if a person registers on an online profile as a nurse in the Southeast, that person could see ads related to the nursing profession. “This is enabling advertisers to go more into the niches…these people are out there on the Web in all sorts of places,” said Kevin Krim, vice president of product at Yahoo HotJobs. “We can reach out to them there with display advertising.”

Newspaper companies are starting to make other investments, too. The New York Times has invested in Indeed.com, a site that lets visitors search for jobs on all the sites that appear on the Web.

One possibility for broad-based sites is to partner with their niche rivals. The difficulty, analysts said, is such an arrangement would hurt the broad-based sites’ revenue because niche sites can’t charge as much for ads. “The larger boards need to be careful because to some extent they could cannibalize themselves [by investing in or working with the emerging sites],” said John Janedis, a publishing and advertising agencies analyst at Wachovia Securities. “Everything is on the table now. We’ll see how it plays out.”

Source

The Battle for the Consumer Online

Quick, name the competitors of U.S. News & World Report. Time and Newsweek, right? Would you believe Consumer Reports?

These are hard times for newsmagazines, and many of them are tweaking their offerings, looking for new ways to thrive — or just to survive. But U.S. News wants to take on a new role, as a definitive source of information and ratings on a range of expensive consumer products.

The first step in that strategy went public Friday on a magazine Web site (usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/cars-trucks) and today on newsstands — rankings, reviews and information on nearly every model of car, truck, minivan or sport utility vehicle available on the American market.

In the 1980s, U.S. News discovered a popular audience for authoritative-sounding statistical rankings, beginning with the annual report on colleges that is widely second-guessed — and even more widely read. It later did the same thing with hospitals, graduate schools, high schools and even places to retire.

The magazine wants to extend that practice to mostly high-end goods, starting with the automotive rankings, followed over the next few years by detailed rankings of things like video cameras, television sets and digital music players. This is less about selling particular issues of the magazine than about driving traffic year-round to Web sites with vastly more material on those products than will fit on printed pages.

The plan is a gamble on where U.S. News’s future lies — a future that its owner, Mortimer B. Zuckerman, describes in terms of shopping as much as news. In an interview in his office on the East Side of Manhattan, Mr. Zuckerman repeatedly cited market research showing that most Americans do research online before making big purchases.

After two decades of rankings, “we have branded credibility,” he said. “You’d have to be blind not to see what is the economic strength of the franchise.”

Building credibility in a new area, however, may take some doing. In its automotive rankings, U.S. News assigns an overall numerical score to each vehicle — along with subscores in a handful of areas — and offers quick, easy-to-use comparisons of that grade to all the others in its class.

But the central feature, the score, is not the product of U.S. News’s own detailed analysis of a car or truck. Rather, it is an analysis of other people’s analyses.

The magazine has searched the work of dozens of automotive reviewers at newspapers and magazines, assigned a numerical value to each review (a process U.S. News describes as complex, rigorous and top secret), and then aggregated those into final scores. The Web site offers a description of each vehicle, sprinkled with snippets of quotes from those reviewers, so that it reads as much like a Zagat’s restaurant blurb as something you might find in Consumer Reports.

“The goal is to take as much subjectivity out of it as possible,” said Rick Newman, a deputy business editor and writer who runs the magazine’s automotive coverage. “You read a car review, all you’re reading is some guy’s opinion. What we’re doing is taking all the credible information that we think is out there. The end result certainly smoothes out a lot of the opinions.”

Roberta Garfinkle, a senior vice president of TargetCast TCM, an advertising buyer, called the single-focus issues and the Web site “an excellent way to draw some advertisers into the franchise that normally would not be there,” like autos and luxury goods.

“They’ve got to try something” to set the magazine apart from its peers, she said. A magazine’s reinventing itself used to be seen as a sign of desperation, Ms. Garfinkle added, “but it’s what everybody has to do now to survive.”

Newsweeklies, like newspapers, have been bleeding revenue for years, and analysts, along with current and former executives, say that U.S. News breaks even, at best. (As a privately held company, it does not release financial information.) It had $126 million in ad revenue in the first half of the year, compared with $224 million for Newsweek and $252 million for Time, according to the Magazine Publishers of America. Paid circulation of U.S. News is about two million, while the two others are above three million.

U.S. News already stood apart from Time and Newsweek in 1984, when it was bought by Mr. Zuckerman, a big real estate developer based in Boston. It had a smaller staff and so, making a virtue of necessity, it offered less straight news coverage of recent events and more news analysis. And it had almost none of the lighter content, like sports or entertainment, that its competitors put in the back section of each issue.

Mr. Zuckerman brought in new editors and strengthened the emphasis on analysis. He mandated a new “back of the book,” made up of practical advice for consumers on personal finance, health, technology, travel and education, an approach that grew indirectly into the rankings.

The strategy worked. Readership rose and the magazine became highly profitable, according to analysts and former executives.

But over the years, a lot of other magazines made similar changes, with more analysis and “news you can use,” while U.S. News experienced rapid turnover among top editors. By the mid-1990s, many people at the magazine were suggesting that Mr. Zuckerman’s attention had moved on to his other pursuits — New York’s Daily News, The Atlantic and, of course, his real estate business — and that U.S. News had lost much of its innovative edge.

“If Mort is engaged again,” said Thomas R. Evans, who served as the magazine’s president and publisher in the 1990s, “it’s a good thing for the magazine because the guy just sees the world better than other people do.”

U.S. News says that at least one early sign of its online experiment is positive: at the outset, advertising on the automotive rankings site, which has thousands of pages, is sold out.

In the printed magazine, “we used to get 500 pages a year of ads out of Detroit, and now we’re down below 50,” acknowledged Mr. Zuckerman, who writes a column for U.S. News and has the title of editor in chief.

When it came to rating hospitals and colleges for a mass audience, U.S. News all but invented the field, but any number of Web sites, magazines and newspapers rank cars and electronics. Rating consumer products “is crowded territory,” said Lee Rainie, a U.S. News managing editor in the 1990s, “so it will be tougher to establish the kind of authority” the magazine has with colleges. Current editors at the magazine agree.

To be successful, U.S. News has to find a broad audience that is not comfortable with magazines aimed at enthusiasts, and wants some of the nuts-and-bolts practicality of Consumer Reports, but without the online subscription charges. “They probably should have done something like this a lot sooner,” Mr. Evans said.