Posted by Seth on September 25th, 2007
“We got it wrong at the outset,” said David Kirk, Fairfax Media CEO.
Mr Kirk said the relaunch, which would occur soon, was due to the site not attracting enough subscribers.
Mr Gill has constantly defended Fairfax’s approach to the AFR’s website, saying it was the best way to commercialise Fairfax’s content.
Unlike most newspaper websites in which content is available free, to access stories written by AFR writers on the site costs between $25 a month and $150/month depending on the subscription level.
This follows
Murdoch said making the site, which currently charges an annual subscription fee of $99, freely available online would help boost viewership–and revenue–globally.
“‘If you make it free, it will hurt the paper’–I don’t think so,” he told investors at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia media conference in New York.
But the fee has hindered the business from attracting an even wider audience globally. That has restricted online advertising, whose rates are set based on the number of viewers.
And earlier…
What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to get access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.
“The business model for advertising revenue, versus subscriber revenue, is so much more attractive,” he said. “The hybrid model has some potential, but in the long run, the advertising side will dominate.”
On Friday, Mr Gill confirmed to The Australian that the site was being relaunched “in a matter of weeks”.
Hope for them all the best on the new site.
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Posted by Seth on September 6th, 2007
We don’t have enough job boards in Australia
…that must be the thought racing through many a budding “Web 2.0″ entrepreneur who may be thumbing through Seek’s latest results - revenue up 47.8%, EBITDA growth of 63.9% to $80.3 million.
Brett posted an entry today on the beta launch of yet another job board (YAJB), jobx.com.au, which sparked a bit of a rant from me in his comments section. Similar sentiments followed the jobsjobsjobs.com.au launch back in June, again as covered by Brett.
For a country with a population the size of Australia, its simply astounding that people think it can accommodate more than 2 generalist job boards. At the moment, those two are Seek and MyCareer (as rated by Nielsen//NetRatings). Over 3 million people frequent these sites every month. Given that the entire working-age population is around 13 million, that would suggest that a quarter of the working age population is actively looking on these two job boards. The leader in the market, Seek has 3.7x lead on its nearest competitor (MyCareer) [Source: Seek financial report 2007]
This entry of jobx.com.au follows several other recent entrants:
- jobs.com.au - backed by financial management company KFG, it splashed out $4 million on idiotic TV campaigns and a site that could only be used by “signing up”-providing your contact details to KFG, or a “two way street” as Scott Kirkwood, KFG’s Managing Director called it, “We offer a full range of financial services to Jobs.com.au members, while at the same time Jobs.com.au acts as a referral service for KFG.” Yep, that sounds two way. It was such a high value service that it (thankfully) folded up a few agonising months after launch.
- jobsjobsjobs.com.au - started by Guy Sigston, who built up Lloyd Morgan before punting it to Candle Recruitment for a cool $9 mil in January 2006. My understanding is that Guy left the business as CEO in May this year, interestingly around the time that the site launched. The site has been heavily promoted by some rather odd/disturbing floating heads on buses, billboards, coffee cups and even Boost drinks. Technically, the site is not bad and is head and shoulders above both jobs.com.au and jobx.com.au. I’m just not sure there’s anything different enough to make it compelling to switch from the two big incumbents. I think it may also be headed for the Australian Job Board Dead Pool as well, but it will probably not have quite the quick and dramatic death that jobs.com.au did.
And that brings us to jobx.com.au. I get the distinct feeling that (a) the designer of the site is a technophile first and a business person second and (b) having failed to come up with a compelling raison d’etre, they went back to their techie roots and thought of all the “cool Web 2.0″ things to add into a site and have tried to jam-pack all these things into the site:
- Obligatory “Beta” tag…check
- User generated content…check
- Tags…check
- Podcasts…check
- Social networking…check
- User ratings…check
- Wikis…check
Buzzword compliant, yes. Solving a real need, no.
Prospective generalist job board starter-uppers (”entrepreneurs”) out there take note : we don’t have a “find a job” problem. That problem has been solved. Another job board is not needed in this market. Unless you can come up with a truly compelling, game changing proposition…save your money and time. The market is red from the intense competition of the 2-3 big players (each probably spending on the order of $10-20 million just in sales and marketing every year) [Source: Seek financial reports].
My recommendation? Read Blue Ocean Strategy. Identify a real need in the market which isn’t being adequately serviced.
Launch a compelling service to meet that need.
Just don’t launch a job board.
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