In a slight nod to the power of paid search, NYTimes.com rolled out new advertising units with its new site launch on Monday, giving employers the option of paying for prominent placement for their listings.
The redesign of The New York Times Co. job site is the culmination of a year’s worth of repositioning since the January 2002 launch of Job Market, which was intended to make the section a combination of the content from the paper and the typical functionality of job boards like Monster and HotJobs.
For an extra $400 fee, employers listing jobs in the paper can have their job description included in a “featured jobs” skyscraper that runs on each page of the site for 28 days. A regular 28-day listing costs $300. (All job listings in The New York Times appear on the site.)
For now, the featured listings are not targeted, but that will probably change in the future, according to Jeff Moriarity, the director of classified operations at New York Times Digital.
“The next phase will be targeting by keyword,” he said. “We’re definitely looking into that.”
In that case, a job seeker who enters “accountant” would receive a skyscraper with featured listings in that field. An employer already can buy the entire skyscraper tied to a search or section. Moriarity said NYTD was unlikely to begin pricing the listings on a cost-per-click basis, like Overture and Google.
In addition to the featured listings, the redesign includes a new large ad unit of the front page of Job Market, intended for recruiters and employers looking to brand themselves to a large number of job seekers.
According to Jupiter Research, which is owned by the parent company of this site, online classified advertising has been a boon. In 2001, the online classifieds market grew 38 percent to $1.1 billion, while offline classified advertising was down 15 percent. By 2007, Jupiter expects online classifieds to net $2.3 billion.
With Job Market, the Times eschewed the online-job-postings approach of its fellow large newspaper companies, which have banded together to form CareerBuilder. With ownership shared between Knight-Ridder, Gannett and Tribune, CareerBuilder hopes it can create the scale needed to compete with the heavyweights of online recruiting, Monster and HotJobs.
As the publisher of the country’s largest paper in the country’s largest job market, the Times has struck out on its own, boasting about 4,000 job listings a week and 350,000 resumes posted — a drop in the bucket compared to the 800,000 job listings and 22 million resumes on Monster. But like The Washington Post, the Times sells its deep penetration of the local market as well as national and international job listings. Job Market also carries a variety of employment-related editorial from the newspaper
The company cross-sells its offline classifieds and online listings, giving employers the chance to reach 4.8 million Sunday readers of the paper as well as the 1.2 million daily visitors to the site.
The redesign comes as NYTD is on something of a roll. Tuesday, The New York Times Co. reported its online unit saw revenues grow to $19.7 million, an 18.5 percent increase compared to the same period last year. NYTD contributed $3.3 million in operating profit for the quarter and $8.3 million for the year.
The good news meshes with a series of upbeat financial reports from newspaper publishers regarding their online units.
