SimplyHired(SH) today launched their Job-a-matic publisher network that plans to use blogging community to sell the job listing. Idea is great – SimplyHired gets to outsource it’s job listing publicity, while bloggers earn their tidbits of $$s and also drive in more job listings. Setting up the service is pretty simple with ability to customize the look and results. You can checkout StartupSquad’s job board at SH by clicking here. However the solution is half-baked right now. Lets look at few reasons:
- As a publishers you don’t get to choose the companies whose ads get displayed on your publisher network. Once you give your keywords you don’t have any controls over the jobs listings coming up. So companies like “Cybercoders Engineering” or “Medical Solutions, Inc” or “Company Unknown” can get included in your results. Soon you can have body-shoppers guessing your keywords to display useless results on your site. If I am going to use Job-a-matic, I want to display maybe 50 jobs, which are highly relevant to my area and companies are known to hire people in those fields. Also as an extension, existing SH advertisers should be able to contact me through the service to get their listing on my blog. Again, this might require a different revenue sharing model.
- Using a custom domain still redirects to your sub-domain located at SH/Job-a-matic. I think one of the aim of running a blog is to promote your own site and your own work, not SH. It would have been much better if SH had developed a widget based solution, where you can just drop the code to your site instead of setting up the redirect. Coghead and Wufoo are good examples of this methodology.
- Revenue sharing is way high — 50-50. SH is using my brand name to sell jobs, and still taking 50%. What SH is providing is just a platform that can display ads, do the payment processing, and some junk ads to your site from Step 1. I think this should come down a bit.
- This might be coming up soon, still I will mention that there is no indication on how publishers will get paid. PayPal, check,…..? It’s like you are launching a solution for real and you don’t even know how you want to pay your customers.
PowerReviews does something similar but for product reviews. It is a fully hosted/SaaS solution to enable commenting on products located on your e-commerce site. What do you get from the service? – 100% uptime, network effect, and best of all it is FREE.
Links:
Jobamatic
StartupSquad Job Board on Jobamatic
March 29, 2007 at 11:13 am |
[...] This service is similar to Jobamatic service launched by Simply Hired earlier this year. As I had indicated in Jobamatic’s case, the relevancy and control over which ads can be displayed is more important than just displaying the ads and rev-sharing. Right now the site is down for maintenance. Would check the job relevancy once it is backup. [...]
April 14, 2007 at 4:34 am |
[...] Here’s an interesting read about the cons of Jobamatic is StartupSquad. [...]