Carey – I haven’t heard an aggregator (unheard of or not) say they can “…do a better job of delivering traffic to a job board..”, but I have heard plenty say that they can help deliver more traffic to client ads. For a job board like Seek, an aggregator is surely just another (legitimate) distribution channel? Don’t you owe it to your clients to get as much traffic to their ads as possible? And does your “protectionist” strategy simply deny your clients maximum exposure for their ads?

Many aggregators approach job boards with the idea that somehow – as an unheard-of brand – they are going to do a better job of delivering traffic to a job board than the job board can do itself.

In the case of SEEK, we have a very strong unaided brand awareness and the Neilsen numbers attest that we do the best job of generating jobseeker traffic in the markets in which we operate.

It follows that there simply isn’t a value proposition for us to work with aggregators.

Can I provoke you, though, to make a comment on Seek being scraped? Is Seek’s policy going to be upheld into the future?

Having been at News Limited during the 2006 investment in SimplyHired it would be inappropriate for me to comment I think.

You’ve posed an interesting question.

Seek is very protective over its job ad content and has asked not to be scraped by verticle search engines. The aggregators would have to go to the true job ad owners individually to get permission to scrape – a time consuming task.

Perhaps Carey Eaton could enhance our understanding of this issue.