Well now I *really* don't believe Borrell !
I've been puzzling over Kip Cassino's response to the detailed critique of his estimates by me and others.
He doesn't address any of the specific concerns raised and relies on vague generalties, like citing "The Tipping Point" to present his case. Nor does he share any data that would give us any way to understand their $3.5 bn revenue estimate.
So I looked into the one specific bit of information he gives -- that there are thousands of boutique job boards, including MediaBistro, that have taken up the dollars dropped from the big guys -- because, as Kip says, "The numbers in our model tend to generate skepticism until you understand their ground-level origin."
As CEO Gordon Borrell previously commented:
We count "local" with very granular detail. Unlike other companies that look at the national picture, add up what's happening with Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs and others, we have a unique database of local media operations that tells us much, much more than anyone can see from a high-level national perch.Our database includes online ad revenue figures from more than 2,200 local media companies that report their revenues directly to us. It's confidential, and used for benchmarking purposes. That database allows us to look into any local market and see almost exactly how much all newspaper Web sites, all TV Web sites, all City.com sites and others are making on Internet advertising.....and how much they're making from online recruitment advertising.
In short, we're counting the thousands of Indians one by one. And they add up to a helluva lot more than anyone realizes.
One more thing you should know. The growth is not attributable to the established recruitment sites such as Monster and CareerBuilder. It is attributable mostly to the new job boards that entered the market in 2005. There were hundreds of new boards -- perhaps thousands -- that went from getting $0 just a year ago to $100,000 or more last year. It all added up to tremendous growth in this segment.
So MediaBistro, which is one of the most successful niche job boards out there, would be a logical choice to include in their survey. After all, Borrell claims to be counting with "very granular" detail the niche job board market. And as MediaBistro is one of the two companies Kip cites as important boutique job boards, Borrell must be gathering job listing revenues from MediaBistro, right?
Wrong.
I e-mailed my friend over at MediaBistro, who is CFO and Publisher, to ask if he shared data with Borrell or had heard of the firm. His reply?:
"Of course we did not share any specific sales data with him...No, I do not know the guy."
Telling.
So the ultimate score is: Borrell has made an outrageous claim about the growth of the online recruitment market, they've been unable to cite specific data that back up that claim, their responses to specific critiques have been vague and data-free, and one of the few specific job boards they cite as the type of company from which they may gather data has never heard of them.
That, in my view, answers the question of Borrell's credibility.
