Forget Online Ad Firms, Job Boards Are Where It's At

Deals

from the dealing-with-a-monster dept

A couple weeks ago, all of the big internet players had to get themselves an online advertising firm. But that’s already old hat, and now attention is turning to online job sites. There was recently a rumor that Google was interested in buying job search engine Simply Hired, and this week Microsoft announced that it bought a small stake in Careerbuilder. Predictably, people are now speculating that Monster.com could be buyout bait, with names like eBay and Gannett thrown out as possible buyers. Once again, this is just analysts playing their games, but it’s interesting to see how quickly this became an area of fascination, seemingly with so little prompting (perhaps all of this portends a coming weakness in the job market, as workers flock to these sites looking for work). The worrisome thing is that between this and the online advertising deals, it looks like the major internet companies are once again trying to be all-in-one portals, rather than trying to be platforms, which is the more evolved strategy.