Online job sites on track to be top earners

A new study by Corzen finds that the total revenues of the top three online job sites for Q3 2004 was $217 million, over $800 million less than revenues for newspaper job pages.

Online job board revenues have steadily increased over the past three quarters, and have grown by a larger percentage, on a year-to-year basis, in each of the last three quarters. Revenues for Q1 2004 were $177 million (a 26.9% increase over Q1 2003), rising up to $195 million in Q2 2004 (a 39.3% increase over Q2 2003) and reached $217 million in Q3 2004 (up 47.4% compared to Q3 2003).

In comparison, newspaper job listings, while posting much higher revenues (at least five times higher), grew by much smaller percentages year-to-year, peaking at 20.2% between Q2 2003 and Q2 2004, and rising as little as 3.9% between Q1 2003 and Q1 2004.

Bruce Murray, CEO of Corzen, notes that This is the third consecutive quarter where online revenues have grown faster than print, which all but confirms the view that online classifieds will eventually overtake print classifieds in volume and revenue. However, although online job postings have been growing at a faster rate than newspaper recruitment revenues, there is still a large gap to make up. Even if revenues for Web-based ads grow their current rate, about $20 million in additional revenue per quarter, and newspaper ads hang steady at just over $1 billion, it will take 40 quarters, or 10 years, for online job board revenues to equal those of newspapers.

The Corzen study includes only Careerbuilder, Monster and HotJobs in its calculations of job board revenues. Although there are more online job sites out there, these three account for not only the overwhelming chunk of revenues for this site category, but also most of the unique audience.

A recent Nielsen//NetRatings report indicates that Monster was the top jobs site for the week ending September 12, 2004, but CareerBuilder was close behind. Monster.com achieved a unique audience of about 2.2 million for the week, compared to just under 2 million for CareerBuilder and 1.2 million for Yahoo! HotJobs. Other sites, like brassring.com and usajobs.com, generally garner unique audiences of less than one quarter the volume of HotJobs, and do not appear on the chart below, which includes the education sites in addition to the top job sites. In sum, the three big job sites brought in 5.344 million unique visitors for the week.