monster’s new flipdog now live

Thu, Jul 20, 2006

Monster’s FlipDog is back hoping to grab some vertical job search real estate. I hate it when I’m right, here and sorta here (No. 3).

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This post was written by:

Joel Cheesman - who has written 1471 posts on Cheezhead Recruiting News and Opinion.

One of the most widely-read bloggers on emerging recruitment issues in the world. Accomplishments include being named Recruiting.com’s Best Technology Recruitment Blog and Best Recruiting Blog. Joel's been featured in Fast Company magazine, BusinessWeek Magazine, Resumes for Dummies, U.S. News & World Report, The Wall Street Journal and more. Plug into Joel via Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, iTunes, YouTube or Flickr.

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2 Comments For This Post

chrisr2 Says:
July 20th, 2006 at 6:22 am

Joel, is it truly ‘vertical’?

http://secretsofthejobhunt.blogspot.com/2006/07/you-cant-teach-old-flipdog-new-tricks.html

JDuarte Says:
July 20th, 2006 at 12:57 pm

I think the only reason Monster did this is because they had a valuable domain name, that received OK traffic, but was underutilized for SEO purposes. By creating and SEO specific site, Monster could compete with CareerBuilder’s jobsearch.com.

Flipdog.com is NOT a Vertical Search Engine, at all, as others have noted. The reality is this is just a “skin” on top of the Monster.com job database. There is no other content, simply jobs.

The job board busines, like a newspaper busines, is based on circulation and exposure. Monster has to maintain a large share of “job seeker” visits, to retain its “Brand Equity” to employers, so they can continue charging their existing rates.

If job seekers start migrating to other job boards, then the “brand equity” of “Monster” will slip, which means the commoditization of the boards, and prices are going to drop.

Candidates are starting to find other job boards, like Craigslist, Indeed, etc. Many of these sites are being found through searches on sites like Google.

If Monster is going to maintain its job seeker “Brand Equity”, one strategy is to dilute the Vertical Engines, while at the same time, competing with them.

Is FlipDog ever going to post jobs from any other site other than Monster.com? I don’t think so. They even have links to “Post a Job” which point to Monster.com.

It’s just another way to dilute the Search Engines, and essentially trick them into thinking this is another job board. This trick by Monster increases their job seeker visits, and increase the number of candidates applying to their clients jobs, etc. Because this is probably a straight SEO play, and therefore, no other marketing dollars being spent on the brand, the intent is simply to drive cheap job seeker traffic to the existing Monster clients.

At some point, we can only expect that the team writing the algorithms for the google search engine will recognize this for what it is, a duplicate of Monster.com. Monster is doing the same thing with Job.com. CareerBuilder is doing the same with Jobsearch.com.

As soon as Google catches up, expect flipdog.com, jobsearch.com, and job.com to be band from the search engine for duplicating content.

Once this happens, you will start seeing the following:
* Increased commoditization of the job board business.
* Increased traffic to the niche and professional association job boards, who currently have good content, but are overshadowed by the Big 2 in SEO.
* Indeed getting purchased, because they have great traffic, but if you own Indeed, you can stop sending traffic to anyone you want.
* CraigsList becoming even more successful in the job market,
* Niche and geographically specific job boards start increasing their share of the job seeker visits.
* CareerBuilder and Monster will be forced to increase their marketing budgets to retain their leadership positions.

chrisr2 Says:
July 20th, 2006 at 6:22 am
Joel, is it truly ‘vertical’?

http://secretsofthejobhunt.blogspot.com/2006/07/you-cant-teach-old-flipdog-new-tricks.html
JDuarte Says:
July 20th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I think the only reason Monster did this is because they had a valuable domain name, that received OK traffic, but was underutilized for SEO purposes. By creating and SEO specific site, Monster could compete with CareerBuilder’s jobsearch.com.

Flipdog.com is NOT a Vertical Search Engine, at all, as others have noted. The reality is this is just a “skin” on top of the Monster.com job database. There is no other content, simply jobs.

The job board busines, like a newspaper busines, is based on circulation and exposure. Monster has to maintain a large share of “job seeker” visits, to retain its “Brand Equity” to employers, so they can continue charging their existing rates.

If job seekers start migrating to other job boards, then the “brand equity” of “Monster” will slip, which means the commoditization of the boards, and prices are going to drop.

Candidates are starting to find other job boards, like Craigslist, Indeed, etc. Many of these sites are being found through searches on sites like Google.

If Monster is going to maintain its job seeker “Brand Equity”, one strategy is to dilute the Vertical Engines, while at the same time, competing with them.

Is FlipDog ever going to post jobs from any other site other than Monster.com? I don’t think so. They even have links to “Post a Job” which point to Monster.com.

It’s just another way to dilute the Search Engines, and essentially trick them into thinking this is another job board. This trick by Monster increases their job seeker visits, and increase the number of candidates applying to their clients jobs, etc. Because this is probably a straight SEO play, and therefore, no other marketing dollars being spent on the brand, the intent is simply to drive cheap job seeker traffic to the existing Monster clients.

At some point, we can only expect that the team writing the algorithms for the google search engine will recognize this for what it is, a duplicate of Monster.com. Monster is doing the same thing with Job.com. CareerBuilder is doing the same with Jobsearch.com.

As soon as Google catches up, expect flipdog.com, jobsearch.com, and job.com to be band from the search engine for duplicating content.

Once this happens, you will start seeing the following:
* Increased commoditization of the job board business.
* Increased traffic to the niche and professional association job boards, who currently have good content, but are overshadowed by the Big 2 in SEO.
* Indeed getting purchased, because they have great traffic, but if you own Indeed, you can stop sending traffic to anyone you want.
* CraigsList becoming even more successful in the job market,
* Niche and geographically specific job boards start increasing their share of the job seeker visits.
* CareerBuilder and Monster will be forced to increase their marketing budgets to retain their leadership positions.

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