Where is Online Recruitment headed ?

eBay Google Look to Lists

Here is an interesting article from Red Herring. Although it talks about eBay too, however, the moot question is - Where is the Online Recruitment business headed ? It would be interesting to see what would be the impact on online Portals such as monster, dice, hotjobs, naukri etc.

As revenue growth slows in other areas, big Internet companies take a lesson in success from sites like Craigslist. Internet companies have woken up to the fact that listings may be theroute to a larger audience and fatter profits.

While eBay has alreadywet its feet, Red Herring has learned from sources close to Google that the search giant plans to get into listings as early as next month.

Online and print classifieds make up a $100-billion global industry,according to estimates from Classifieds Intelligence, an interactiveadvertising consulting and research firm. It's a market thelarger search and e-commerce giants could easily tap.

"All these companies are trying to create new communities ofpeople who didn't advertise before," said Jim Townsend,editorial director at Classifieds Intelligence."You can argue `these are free,' butmost of them have schemes for up-selling to advertisers."

For Google, listings would be a natural progression, as it has single-handedly transformed online advertising into an integral part ofmarketing campaigns for small- and medium-sized businesses.Regardless of what kinds of listings it gets into, it would beanother stream of revenue. Google declined to comment on its plans.

Many newspapers have begun to offer certain categories of onlineadvertisements for free, in an attempt to draw the audience thatfound newspaper classifieds too expensive in the past (see TechSpin:Papers Fight Google).

Many Internet companies, hampered by a deceleration in revenuegrowth, are betting on listings, too. eBay, for one, has zeroed in onlistings as a new source of revenue to combat its slowing growth overthe past year.

eBay made its most aggressive foray last week when it boughtShopping.com for $620 million. But it had stepped into the field in2004 when it dished out $415 million for Rent.com and also took a 25percent stake in locally focused listings site Craiglist.org.

eBay also bought Dutch classifieds web site Marketplaats.nl for $290million and German vehicles listings site Mobile.de for $149 million.

In March, eBay launched Kijiji.com, a group of web sites carryingclassified listings across more than 90 cities outside the UnitedStates. It's a concept similar to Craigslist, but implementedabroad. Kijiji expanded last month, too, through its purchases ofclassifiedweb sites Gumtree.com and Loquo.com.When it announced its acquisition of Shopping.com, the online auctionhouse said it wanted to reach a wider audience. Shopping.com had 22.6million unique visitors in April, according to comScore Media Metrix.That might be a small number when compared to eBay's 63.8 millionin the same time frame, but it's a number that reflects anincrease of 15 percent over the past year, compared with eBay's6 percent.

When it announced its acquisition of Shopping.com, the online auctionhouse said it wanted to reach a wider audience. Shopping.com had 22.6million unique visitors in April, according to comScore Media Metrix.That might be a small number when compared to eBay's 63.8 millionin the same time frame, but it's a number that reflects anincrease of 15 percent over the past year, compared with eBay's6 percent.