Short History of Job Boards, Part 2
For all the flash and fire attendant to our industry, there are remarkably few businesses of scale -- in fact, perhaps as few as 6 that are grossing more than $10 mm a year -- and even then the spoils go disproportionately to the big guys.- The number one and two players control over half the business (whether the open derision with which industry wags greet CareerBuilder's numbers is justified, we'll leave for another day)
- The combined revenue of players 3 - 6 is an order of magnitude lower than those top two
- And I'd be astounded if the combined revenue of all the other small fry equal that of #1
| Job Board History | ||
| Year founded | 1990 - 1996 | 1997 -- present |
| # started | 1,000 | 30,000 |
| # > $10mm | 5 | 1 |
What this chart shows is a breakdown for the first few years of the internet vs. the last ten years, comparing the number of job boards started, and of those started in that time period, the number that exceed the $10 mm in annual sales level.
In the first few years of the internet, out of the thousand job boards started, only Monster, CareerBuilder (and its antecedents), HotJobs, Dice, and Craigslist surpassed $10 mm in annual revenue.
In the past decade, the dizzying profusion of job boards, from the Apparel Job Board to Veterans Employment and all points in between, has spread career-changing to every corner of the internet. But out of all that sturm and drang, search and post, point and click, there hadn't been a job board that surpassed the $10 mm level until we crossed it last year.
I'd suspect that the next folks to cross that hurdle would be Jobster, followed by LinkedIn. Perhaps not in 2006, but by the end of the year, or early 2007. And as clients, we're certainly rooting for SimplyHired and Indeed to make it to that level, though we'll have to watch and see the rate of adoption for PPC advertising amongst recruiters.
It's worth remembering that we are perhaps a $2 billion industry today. And that's small. Apple sells more dollars worth of iPods, heck, Friskies sells more dollars worth of cat food, than that.
The broader Recruitment Advertising market is a little bit bigger, but still a medium-sized, industry -- anywhere from $15 to $30 bn in revenues depending on who you ask -- so we online folks are a small industry within a middling industry!
So on one hand, the small number of players that have achieved scale in the business is no surprise.
On the other hand, the amount of development effort that goes into building new online recruitment sites -- from companies looking to attract candidates, to media properties hoping to monetize their audience to new start-ups looking to raise (and spend) venture capital -- is prodigious. I'll look at that topic further in this continuing series....
