CareerBuilder, which is a joint venture by newspapers, outbid a $25 million per annum deal, struck at the peak of the dotcom bubble, between Monster and AOL, where the jobs service pays the portal for exclusivity. The reason:
“newspapers’ jobs classified ad revenue, which dropped by half from $8.7 billion in 2000, to $4.3 billion in 2002”.
Imagine if the entire classified ad business not only went online but decentralized and was based around RSS syndication and aggregation?