Help wanted ads have long been a mainstay for newspaper revenues. Now the media market research firm Borrell Associates says online recruitment revenues surpassed print for the first time in 2006 – with no reason to suspect anything but more losses for old media in the future, A MediaPost report summarizing Borrell’s findings notes that:
“Much of the online growth is expected to come from small and medium-sized businesses posting local ads for hourly and part-time workers. Already, two-thirds of online job revenues are generated by niche boards or regional Web sites focusing on specific categories such as nursing, technology or food services.”
What does this mean?
The first and most obvious inference is that localized and industry specific e-publications should be targeting help-wanted ads with direct sales forces if they can manage, or by whatever means available if they can’t.
These findings also suggest that online recruitment ads deliver results. I can hardly imagine a more immediate feedback loop than an employer looking to hire and either getting or not getting results from a given advertising placement. I don’t imagine that online ads will trump print for all messages. But where specificity is the goal, online rules.
FYI: Borrell sells its full reports but provides free executive summaries.
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The medium truly is the message: I’m a fan of BIGresearch, a survey firms that polls unusually large samples so that it can parse and segment the overall group and still get statistically valid results from the breakdown. Anyhow, I saw a most curious summary of a BIGresearch report that suggests — as I understand it — that consumers are buying mobile and time-shifting technologies because they want to stay connected. It’s not as if they want any specific content. More like they’re concerned they might miss something. The Center for Media Research’s distilled version of the survey quotes BIGresearch vice president Joe Pilotta:
“What should be apparent to marketers is that the mobile, intermittent and attentive lifestyle is a fact and connectivity is key to this lifestyle. Content is a value-add, but not the prerequisite.”
Okay. So content has gone from being king (or queen) to an afterthought. And I say that as if it’s a bad thing.
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Looking for a few good e-magazine publishers: The French Magazine Trade Association, SPMI, is conducting a survey of “the best success strategies for consumer magazines on the web.” In an email message from Juliette Valains wrote:
“If you know a local expert that could help us with the research (a publisher, advertising agency, journalist, or whoever you judge convenient), don’t hesitate to give us his details, so that we can contact him to learn about as many success stories as possible, and thus improve the written report we will send you.”
Email Juliette at jvalains (at) qualiquanti.com. The SPMI website is — naturellement tout en Francais.Â