online job ads – musings

I am seeing long tails everywhere man; thing is, for online jobs ads you don’t have to look hard. Advertisers that could never get to page 555 in the paper now can have their ads published like never before. Similarly, there is now a wide choice of outfits to take your ad, whether it is a general,board, a niche one, a social software based site, etc. Budgets previously dedicated to print advertising are now slowly moving (too slowly for some – well there’s always the old media fight-back via display ads, so don’t sell your shares in the daily bugle yet) to the interactive realm.

On the job seeker flipside, the idea was also to provide increased availability of opportunities. There were always more good jobs than those plastered in the EGN section. In this context, volumes and usage increased hand in hand. Then size, supposedly, became an issue.

Size is a two-dimensional challenge in regards to online ads as I see it, the two being interdependent. Ceteris paribus though:

1 – Large databases run the risk of overwhelming/boring/disengaging job seekers with choice, as the choice massively increases, with no improvements on search or filtering facilities.

2 – The decreasing quality of the large(r) databases is exacerbated by the low cost of publishing and no ‘perceived’ effectiveness loss for the publisher due to the lower database quality (e.g. no issues if I spam people with the same job thirty times, applicants are still streaming through).

The corollary from this is that niche boards are not exempt from facing the same risk as a generalist job board. Like everyone else, niche sites need to pursue content and volumes to drive the momentum required to get the community going (brett. pls jump in to complete or negate this point)

My takeaways from this limping rant:

Large is not a problem per-se
Niche is not a panacea per-se
Database Quality drives a sustainable revenue/business model
Site functionality and Price are two tools to mould publisher behavior
Site Functionality and content – both contributing to improved searching and filtering , may get your visitors to stick around a bit longer

HT Michael’s post on the topic and the ancillary comments generated