News Corp is buying a stake in online job search engine SimplyHired.com.
The media giant is investing in online job search engine Simply Hired. Deal is the latest addition to Rupert Murdoch’s growing Internet Empire.
News Corp., the media giant which owns the popular social networking site, recently announced that it is making a strategic investment in Simply Hired, a privately held search engine that combs through online job listings.
Simply Hired is an advertising supported Web search engine that lets people search other employment-related classified advertisements on such sites as CareerBuilder.com, Monster and Craigslist.
News Corp., through its Fox Interactive Media unit, is investing $3.5 million in the company. Venture capital firm Foundation Capital is investing $10 million. Simply Hired said that including these investments, the company has now raised a total of $17.7 million.
The investment by News Corp. is the latest in the company’s aggressive push into online media. In addition to buying MySpace parent Intermix Media last year; News Corp. also recently purchased gaming and entertainment site IGN and Scout, a sports-news and data site.
Simply Hired chief executive officer Gautam Godhwani said that News Corp.’s investment will give it a "substantial" stake in the company.
For News Corp., investing in Simply Hired is a move toward reclaiming revenue generated by classified advertising — a business newspapers once dominated but which has steadily shifted to the Internet. News Corp. has its roots in the newspaper business.
"Classified revenue is important to News Corp. overall," a Fox Interactive spokeswoman said. We are looking for ways to participate in those revenue streams as they move online. This is one step in that direction.
And more acquisitions and investments could be on the way. Since the MySpace purchase, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has said that the company intended to spend up to $2 billion on Internet deals.
Fox Interactive Media’s growth strategy is to strategically partner or acquire category leaders and technology innovators that broaden or enrich our users’ experience, said Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media in a written statement.
Our investment in Simply Hired underscores that approach and we look forward to working with them to power job search for a variety of properties on our network.
News Corp. has been focused on buying more Internet properties for the past year. Last July, the company paid $580 million for teen online hangout MySpace.
The demographic on MySpace is junior high school, high school and college kids … Some of these folks will be looking for jobs, said Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, an Internet consumer behavior consultant. "Why not be able to serve up listings from there?"
MySpace has more than 50 million registered users and is among the fastest growing Web properties. It commands about 50 percent of the market share of all U.S. Web community sites, according to Hitwise.
Over the past two years, Murdoch has urged newspapers to modernize and to build a new business model to survive. Unlike other leading Internet jobs classified advertising sites such as Monster Worldwide Inc. and Yahoo Inc.’s HotJobs, Simply Hired does not solicit job postings from employers.
Sterling said Simply Hired investment also could be a good fit for the company’s newspaper publishing business as well, given the importance of classified ads to that business. News Corp. owns the New York Post and scores of publications across the globe.
Godhwani said that for now, Simply Hired is focusing mainly on the U.S. job market but he did not rule out working more closely with News Corp. down the road in order to expand internationally.
The online job recruitment business is highly competitive with established leaders such as Monster.com, Yahoo!’s HotJobs, and CareerBuilder, which is owned by a consortium of newspaper companies, all fighting for job listings.
But upstarts such as Simply Hired have attracted attention because of their Google -like approach to the online job listing market. Employers do not pay to have their jobs posted on these sites as they do with Monster and others.
Instead, the companies simply coarse through existing listings at corporate Web sites, online classified and newspaper listings and job boards. Godwhani said that through mid-April, it had about 5.4 million jobs in its database, including listings posted on Monster, HotJobs and CareerBuilder.
News Corp. has about $1.4 billion earmarked for Internet investments, company executives have said. Murdoch has also expressed interest in investing in search technology, but has not publicly identified any targets.