Since I can’t spell brilliant it makes it really hard to read the Wall Street Journal, but I made it through the paper the other day and found this article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124346897475360551.html. This is visionary…not the idea of job fairs in big cities. That would be considered on par w/ starting a newspaper w/out a website in these days and times.

And if you want spelling advice, stop by RealMatch. Its exit 19 off the Jersey turnpike…then take a right at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Thanks Rafael for defending my brilliance.

-Eric

I never thought that if you could actually pull off the impossible task of getting this new job fair concept off the ground…that it should start in larger cities w/ all those people. If I was smart enough to conceptualize this…I totally would’ve started in smaller, rural markets, but I think you’re on to something w/ this larger city thing.

I would say good luck, but w/ your handle on Web 2.0 you don’t need luck.

Evidently Eric I am now!

To put this into further perspective, the comment I made relates to aggregation within the UK market. Here in the UK we simply don’t enjoy the same level of job seeker search volume potential that you have stateside hence free aggregation isn’t as lucrative / Viable.

A free listing aggregation site in the UK can only ever be a lifestyle business unless it can sell premium adspace positioning to compliment its listings and I will explain why:-

Problem 1 – A free aggregation site in the UK, even if it optimizes the back end out of it, it can only gain a traffic reach of a certain level. Of that reach only a percentage of those visitors will click on adwords. This percentage is eroded further as ad streams may include adverts that are promoted because the advertiser needs traffic from Google, yet are not so desirable to be clicked on. A good example could be say “Army Careers” bidding on “Engineering Jobs”. Your average engineer looking for an engineering role may not click on it because they have no interest in joining the army, so it may have a low click conversion yet if the advert was for a general engineering site it may attract higher click conversion rates – Problem 1, the free aggregator has little control over ad selection hence lower control of conversion rates.

Problem 2 – As adwords becomes more and more expensive, advertisers with high click conversion rates may restrict ads to Google only rather than the network because they only have so much budget to spend, hence compounding problem 1, more of the lower click conversion adverts are more likely to feature.

Problem 3 – In order for the aggregation site to increase its traction of the right candidates it has to invest in marketing, this being expensive. Having secured quality candidates from marketing the last thing it will want to do is send them onto adwords as it would be making a loss unless its supporting own paid content i.e. it costs more to buy in the right traffic than would be received back from a share of adwords revenue. Its only viable sending traffic that way currently because its free in the first place, i.e selling traffic back to google that google sends it for free.

Problem 4 – Google is not here to provide free traffic, the traffic it sends a site is a bonus and it’s not guaranteed. Sure, all job sites are going to optimise their sites the best they can, who wouldn’t, but traffic from Google can only be part of the bigger marketing picture and one turn of the dial against MFA (made for adsence) sites at Google HQ and its goodnight Vienna so sites have to do other forms of marketing to protect their position – hence can’t avoid a marketing overhead

Problem 5 – To sell premium adspace / clicks, the traffic quality has to be good with a high conversion for those advertisers hence a more global marketing policy has to be introduced to secure the right mix of candidates, hence a high cost factor to the site.

Problem 6 – A free aggregation site can only remain in business as long as the traffic to it, is predominantly free, hence it’s solely reliant on being propped up by Google which isn’t a good idea. As for arbitrage the margin would be small in the early years until the site is established enough to have a natural following (this would have taken many years and capital spent on marketing with google and elsewhere to be noticed anyway in the first place.)

In the UK one of the market leading generalist jobs boards is total jobs with a reach of about 2.2 million job seekers a month. To get this level it has to invest significant sums into marketing each month. For an aggregator to reach this kind of level in the UK it would have to do the same, hence it’s earning potential solely as a made for adsence site would be limited. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the slice of the free search traffic pie in the UK isn’t big enough.

Finally, to sum up the UK market will change in my opinion because free aggregation in order to be viable outside of a lifestyle business would have to attract paying clients. To attract paying clients it has to deliver quality and it do that has to invest in marketing. I’m not calling the demise of aggregation here, far from it, we are in the business, what I’m commenting is that the landscape will change towards a paying model imo because free has limitations against the backdrop of quality marketing spend required to attract the right candidates that advertisers need.

Rich

The job seeker coming from an aggregator is already interested in the job on the job board, because it was able to find it and choose it over the other results it found from a broader array of sources.

NO BRAINER

Short lived? Is the traffic to a job board different from the traffic to an aggregator? Is there any real meaning to this statement?

Did you give any thought as to why newspapers would benefit on multiple levels by using aggregators to drive traffic to a newspaper’s job site? Why newspapers in specific, the same is true of all job sites in general.

Why are newspaper’s job site special in this case Vanessa?