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

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.

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