Print help wanted ads continue their downward spiral this month. A story in MediaPost today reveals a 2-point decline in newspapers classifieds for jobs, while online properties rose at a healthy pace.
Craigslist, according to the article, has tripled its growth from a year ago. I believe this is the real story within the story.
There’s an unchallenged shift from print to online to fill job openings, however there’s also a growing shift from online offering to online offering. This is primarily based on a significant gap between cost/benefit of a site like Craigslist and paid sites such as Monster, CareerBuilder and HotJobs.
True, Craigslist is a pay service in three major markets, but the cost is negligible when compared to the prices of the Big Three boards. When talking to people who track the activity of where postings are going, a remarkable shift in growth is occurring on Craigslist versus the paid boards in the U.S.
This growth hasn’t gone unnoticed by players like Google, who I suspect will be launching a "Craigslist killer" in the near future. And that carnage should fall to the rest of the job board world, as well as print.
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August 20th, 2005 at 6:43 am
Agree this area is seeing some big changes – eBay has bought http://www.gumtree.com/ – a Craigslist-like site, while other similar sites are launching around the world like http://www.bakotopia.com/ in the US and http://london.adzooks.co.uk/ in the UK. Will be interesting to see what happens as Google and Yahoo increase their activity in this space.