Losers Hang Out at a Bar; Reminisce
What else to make of this article from BusinessWeek about Newspapers in talks with Yahoo about a confused array of topics but likely starting with collaboration around recruitment ads.
The talks seem to be between Media News, Hearst Newspapers and Yahoo, and up until the Knight Ridder acquisition, Mclatchey. Now that they have the juicy Carreerbuilder stake and Classified Ventures stake (Homegain; Homescape; Cars.com etc.), they seem to have dropped off.
Poor Yahoo Hotjobs seems to be the connector. Once a viable third player in recruitment, it was rolled up into the whale of “Marketing and services” of Yahoo last year, while Monster soared and Careerbuilder defied gravity and did even better than Monster (such that it’s now fair to call it the leader in the recruitment space).
Why am I so cynical? Well consider these quotes from the article:
“Help-wanted is the quick cash,” says one executive involved in the discussions, “but news search is the long-term future.”
You couldn’t be talking about two different things.
“At least one newspaper executive involved in the discussions says he nurses hopes that Web surfers eventually will pay small fees — micropayments, in Web parlance — for some newspaper content.”
Keep dreaming, mate.
This from MediaNews Group Chairman and CEO W. Dean Singleton: “The industry needs to come together to find a search-engine model so that we begin to monetize news”.
Translation: Fuck the unions. Why are we paying these people to write when we could link to the amateurs?
But the real kicker: “The Yahoo talks began last October.”
That’s right, October. Nine months ago.
No doubt something will happen. But I’ll wager it will be an over-dressed announcement that involves the non-Careerbuilder Newspaper groups providing a Google-base-like feed to Yahoo so that they can search they jobs, cars and houses better. Which in itself is not a bad thing. Yahoo will probably announce a more generic structured feed for other classifieds providers along with it and look smart while the newspapers think they achieve something more strategic than they actually will.
