BusinessWeek has uncovered a potential partnership between Yahoo! and “a loose consortium of newspaper publishers.” The story, “Dailies Strike Back at Web,” goes into the specifics, saying:
[The two companies] are mulling a partnership that would encompass Web classifieds, local news, and content packages based on general themes, like travel. This could drive more traffic to Yahoo’s help-wanted site HotJobs (YHOO ), which trails its key competitors, and bolster future Yahoo moves into local offerings. Newspaper companies would build a network within what is one of the Web’s top destinations and win a crucial concession in today’s search-engine economy: getting a cut of the ads sold around search results of their content. It’s a sore spot for publishers that this doesn’t happen now.
We’ll see. Many would argue that CareerBuilder’s integration with a print powerhouse has helped catapult it into the same market position as Monster, if not past it.
Others would argue that such partnerships are a reaction by print to try and solve a problem by simply throwing money at it and by trying to steamroll market forces – forces they clearly aren’t built to handle anyway – instead of creating truly remarkable products and customer experiences.
I would fall in the latter. Anyone think the $100 million CareerBuilder threw at AOL and MSN has made a huge impact on actually making CareerBuilder better? Anyone think a “loose consortium of newspaper publishers” is going to heal what’s ailing HotJobs?
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