Monster Pays Yahoo $225 Million for HotJobs

The Washington Post

Yahoo has ben trying to unload HotJobs for a while, and it finally came to a deal with Monster, which will take the site off of Yahoo's hands for $225 million in cash. As part of the deal, Monster will continue to power Yahoo's job listings for three years.

Both Hotjobs and Monster have been lagging newer job search sites such as Indeed, which searches the entire Web for job listings. According to comScore, Indeed's jog search reached 8.4 million individuals in the U.S. in December, 2009, compared to only 5.4 million for HotJobs and 6.1 million for Monster. Maybe with the acquisition, Monster can take the top spot again, although there is a lot of overlap in those numbers.

For Yahoo, it gets rid of a declining property, boosts to its cash position, and can focus on growth areas in Yahoo seo. Yahoo has been selling off or shutting dow non-core assets, including recently selling Zimbra to VMWare for $350 million, shutting down its Shopping API, and of course the long-awaited deal with Microsoft to hand over its search to Bing.

Monster recently launched its 6Sense semantic search technology across different products including resume and candidate search. 6Sense is aimed at bringing up more relevant results even when there is no exact keyword match by using semantic analysis and understanding the different ays that the same job or job requirements can be described. Monster needs all the help it can get. Today it announced fourth quarter revenues of $213 million, down 27 percent, and a net loss of $2.1 million. For the year, revenues were down 32 percent to $905 million. Full year net income was $19 million, compared to $125 million in 2008.