News Limited and Monster Worldwide Announce Joint Venture
November 27, 2008 by Geoff Jennings
“Monster Worldwide, the parent company of Monster.com, the premier global online employment brand, will own 50% of News Limited’s employment website CareerOne.com.au in the new joint venture.”
What does this mean for the Australian job board space? Probably not much. Here’s the reason why – Monster have previously folded in Australia, CareerOne has never been any threat to market leader Seek. Two wrongs don’t make a right, two positives don’t make a negative. there’s no reason to suggest that this partnership will achieve any more than either entity achieved separately.
What does this mean for the advertising market? Big dollars. Monster’ll no doubt be putting truckloads into the promotional needs of this alliance…a bit of a boost in a low ebb.
It’s the job seeker who may receive a nominal benefit from the new lovers. Monster has created some innovative career mapping tools targeted at the job seeker, probably similar to that of Mycareer’s Headhunter offering. This might make the process of job seeking a little more efficient.
[...] Monster goes kangaroo and hops to Australia Published in November 27th, 2008 Posted by Eva Zils in Acquisitions More on this on Geoff Jennings Australian Online Recruitment Blog. [...]
I have to disagree with you here.
I see this move as significant for a couple of reasons.
Firstly CareerOne has been hamstrung by it’s technology for years and has spent a lot of energy, management time and dollars trying to fix this. They have not been able to introduce many of the market innovations of their competitors (such as premium listings etc) which must have hindered their ability to monetise their audience and client base. This issue is now resolved and they can focus all their efforts on building their business and monetising the site, with market leading technology behind them
Secondly News has yet to offer a really slick online/offline advertising solution to its customers in the way Fairfax has. This should be one of it’s competitive advantages over SEEK, but it has failed to exploit it. Again Monster provides both the technology to do this and the expertise from having done the same in the US with many print partners
Thirdly this deal presumably injects cash into CareerOne to allow them to keep the pedal to the metal on marketing spend and business development spend at precisely the time when SEEK and Fairfax will be under enormous pressure to reduce costs due to declining revenue. CareerOne has recently be establishing themselves as a clear number 2 in the market – this position should now accelerate and the market will finally be presented with a clear and credible alternative to Seek
Anyone who does not recognise the coming together of two 600lbs Gorillas as a significant threat and as a game changing play is delusional
I don’t feel that a piece of technology, a bit of marketing together with a bundle offering will be the silver bullet needed to propel CareerOne into a market leading position.
Seek’s formula to success was the aggressive attack on print at a time when the newspapers were the “delusional” ones in thinking that Seek would never get large enough to bother them. They even saw their own online offerings as a protective measure and not something that would impact on print revenues.
Seek had perfect timing and brilliant execution to achieve their market leading position.
News and Fairfax don’t have this luxury. They can’t suddenly suggest that print is expensive and doesn’t work so come over to our online career sites. Offering a bundle solution shows that they are still denying what the market is telling them that print is gone. Even the ‘job board’ concept itself has no long term future.
Too little, too late.
Geoff, I do agree that technology and marketing will not take CareerOne to a market leading position, but I do still see this as a significant move
Up until now the choice for us Advertisers has been SEEK (no choice); either CareerOne or MyCareer, some niche players and desperate generalists who give free trials
The key here being that we have had no leverage when it came to price negotiations with SEEK, who had to pay what they asked as you had to be on the site
We need a strong alternative, a strong number two, in order that we get some bargaining power
For 9 years CareerOne and MyCareer have been battling it out for No2, with no clear winner emerging. For us Advertisers it is six of one, half a dozen of the other. Lets face it we use their brand names interchangeably, and most of us do not know which one is Fairfax and which News. The only winner in this situation has been SEEK
Recently CareerOne has started to build a consistent lead in visitor numbers, but the differentiation has not been clear enough. I believe this CareerOne/Monster proposition starts to create a significant enough differentiation in Advertisers (my) minds for them to start to establish themselves as a clear number two. It would also help if CareerOne re-branded and dropped the ‘Career’ bit from their brand
This is bad news for Fairfax/MyCareer who become the also ran (unless they team up with SEEK), and for SEEK who will see further price pressure as Advertisers for the first time start to be presented with a realistic alternative
I think this will take 18-24 months to play out, but I do believe it will happen
[...] scratching their heads. They’re likely to do the same in 2009, as a result of the new joint venture with Monster. We might see some action on the new look partnership offering by the end of 2009, but by then it [...]