Oodle, a vertical search engine for online classifieds, today announced a partnership with MySpace.
A trip to MySpace classifieds, as of this writing, still shows the old offering, but the image above should give you a taste of what’s to come. A seemingly good deal for Oodle, but …
My knee-jerk reaction when seeing this was, “What’s going to happen to Simply Hired?” As many already know, Simply Hired runs MySpace’s jobs section at jobs.myspace.com. Both sites will have nearly the same content. The Simply Hired co-brand is still alive and kicking and even integrates video by CareerTV. That aside, is it fair to ask if this is the end of Simply Hired on MySpace?
Oodle CEO Craig Donato doubts it, saying, “I suspect it won’t change anything” when asked if his deal with MySpace would eighty-six Simply Hired. I guess that’s probably a good bet. MySpace ownership News Corp has a stake in Simply Hired to the tune of $13.5 million. Plus, MySpace has always had a crappy classifieds section to go along their Simply Hired cobrand, complete with manually posted, free jobs.
What’s strange, however, is that navigation to the jobs site, powered by Simply Hired, has vanished (right) along with any other significant promotion.
Classifieds are highlighted in the main navigation, but a jobs link, which used to be there, is absent. Why hide access to jobs.myspace.com? Maybe Simply Hired wasn’t bringing in enough money or maybe News Corp has lost faith in the business model as a stand-alone. Similar to large portals, such as MSN, who rent real estate to the highest bidder, MySpace may be getting wise to its real cash-printing value.
It’s no secret MySpace needs to bring in more revenue, so maybe this is a “try something else” moment. Chances are Oodle didn’t land the deal for free (terms of the deal were not disclosed), so Murdoch probably got to pocket some cash.
Simply Hired CEO Gautam Godhwani, however, isn’t worried. “MySpace has discussed a new classifieds offering for some time now,” he says. “MySpace Jobs is a distinct initiative. We know the team at Oodle and plan to work actively with them on integration points.”
For his sake, I hope he’s right.
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July 29th, 2008 at 2:03 am
Our free job posts are indexed by both SimplyHired and Oodle so I don’t foresee any major impact for our users but it will be interesting to see how it develops.
Paul Pickthorne
Chief Free Officer
Smuz, Inc
http://www.smuz.com
July 29th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I think the real value of myspace for Simply Hired has been in terms of the Search Engine traffic. On numerous job related search queries you’ll find some myspace/simplyhired entry in the first 20 or so results. I’m not sure of the core simplyhired traffic numbers, but their claimed network traffic of around 7 million uniques depends heavily on the myspace traffic. If this were to get transferred to oodle, that would be the real bad news for simplyhired.
Ultimately though, the job verticals have to distinguish themselves from the more generic aggregators such as vast and oodle…and it’s not too hard to do so if you know what you are really doing.
August 12th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
I wish myspace, facebook and others would find other ways to make money then becoming a giant job board and candidate database, like linkedin has become. Job boards just pollute the true purpose and integrity of these sites.
Robert @
http://www.CareerSitesCompany.com