“Dude, Monster’s FlipDog is not a vertical. It’s just their own jobs.”
I’m paraphrasing, but a good number of people decided to come out of the woodwork last week when I wrote about Monster relaunching FlipDog as a vertical search engine.
No way! said the naysayers. It can’t be a vertical if they’re simply aggregating their own jobs.
Fine. However, I think such sentiment is a bit nearsighted. Does anyone really think Monster went through the trouble of retooling FlipDog if they were just going to aggregate their own job content? I don’t. What a waste of time that would be. I believe the FlipDog you see today will be different from the FlipDog you see 12 months from now. Otherwise, why do it?
Forest for the trees, right? Well, don’t miss the bigger issue. Monster tip-toeing into vertical search is a big deal. It’s saying, “Yeah, we kinda sorta think that the value of job listings is going down and this search stuff might have some legs and, well, maybe we should be prepared if it does take off … just not at the expense of the Monster brand.”
It reminds me of a time in the ’90s when newspapers relunctantly went online and their classifieds followed. Now, they’re even investing in verticals.
Dimissing the move as “just them aggregating their own jobs” is folly.
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July 24th, 2006 at 1:35 pm
You cant ignore the SEO boost they will get from it…literally thousands of sites currently link to flipdog.com….Thats more traffic for all of monster’s jobs. From a traffic standpoint its a no-brainer.
Perhaps they will include others sites ‘ala’ HotJobs but Monster jobs will always come first. But somehow I cant see them turning into an Indeed without skewing results to their own jobs.
July 26th, 2006 at 7:49 am
Obviously Monster is making a profound statement by venturing into the Vertical search arena, but it would be to the determent of the Monster brand if they were to turn to true vertical search. I am certain they will begin to aggregate positions from other sources, but I would be shocked if they were to aggregate the likes of competitors such as Careerbuilder or HotJobs. With sites such as indeed.com leading the way, Monster seems to be a little late to the party.