The decision by Fox Interactive Media and Foundation Capital to drop $13.5 million into SimplyHired is an interesting one in light of the website’s competition, who boasts more traffic. According to Hitwise, SimplyHired.com brings in only a third of traffic rival job site Indeed.com.
One might assume that Murdoch and company see a lot of potential in the one-year old job search engine. That Indeed.com gathers thrice as much traffic is only super impressive if we speak in fractions. But this is a fraction of a fraction.
In fairness, Indeed.com and SimplyHired.com control just under one percent of the job search market combined – but it still makes a person curious as to why SimplyHired’s 0.22 percent market share was more appealing than Indeed’s 0.76 percent market share.
It may be that SimplyHired.com has been pummeling (in a relative sense) two-year old competitor Jobster.com, which holds a meager 0.18 percent market share, and Fox Interactive Media believes SimplyHired is on pace to beat out Indeed as well.
But still, any one of these classified startups has a long way to go if they want to capture a meaningful market share. The job search pie looks like it was sliced by Taylor Hicks during a mid-song seizure. CareerBuilder and Monster handle the bulk of things with a combined 35 percent. The rest of the top ten shows numbers no higher than 5.5 percent and as low as 0.81 percent.
Is News Corp. chasing a hunch that’s not obvious to the rest of us? Part of that hunch, as many have said, stems from the enormous room for growth still present in the online classified sector. A whopping 80 percent of employment dollars are still offline.
The equation then, is an attractive one. SimplyHired matches more of the hipster feel that Fox usually goes for, has shown strong growth in the past year against older competitors, would be a good fit for a large job-seeking captured demographic News Corp. found in MySpace, and provides a wedge into a market that will likely explode in the next few years.
Overall, you’d have to say it’s a good play.
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