Sunday, March 24, 2002

The Monster That's Feasting on Newspapers
Over the last few years, Internet job sites, especially Monster, have eaten away at
newspapers' help-wanted ads, which inch for inch have been their single most profitable
product. In the process, Monster has become one of the biggest dot-com businesses around,
and the most profitable. With $536 million in revenue last year, it had pretax operating income
of $150 million, edging out eBay (news/quote), which had a $140 million operating profit.

This is grim news for newspapers, and no relief is in sight. "Even if the economy recovers, the
newspapers are not ever going to get back to the levels they saw from 1995 to 2000," said
Craig Huber, an analyst at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter (news/quote), who estimates that
about 10 percent of the help-wanted market is now online; he expects that to rise to 25
percent within three years.

Newspapers have fought back. Most of them allow companies that place help-wanted ads to
have them listed on the newspaper Web site, too, for an additional fee. Some, like The New
York Times, have adopted some features of stand-alone job sites, like résumé databases.

The Tribune Company (news/quote) and Knight Ridder have gone further, jointly buying two
independent job sites, Careerbuilder.com and Headhunter.net, to create a hybrid — under the
Careerbuilder name — that sells listings along with newspaper ads and has a national sales
force.

The recession has tilted the balance even more toward Monster, as more employers choose to give what little money they have for recruiting to Internet sites because they are cheaper and more efficient.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/technology/24MONS.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

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