Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?

36 pointsmoksha25629 comments

I'm working on an educational content-centric site as a side-project. I'm considering partly monetizing it with job listings.

Assume there are different areas on the site for everything from computer science to math to art to physics etc.

How much traffic to the relevant area would I need (e.g., computer science) in order for a company (e.g., Google) to consider paying for a job posting?

I know this is still very vague, but any ballpark numbers?

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I work at Assembly and have paid pretty close attention to Coderwall, which might have some lessons for you.

Coderwall has around 500,000 unique user sessions per month, and it's all software developers. They monetize in a few different ways.

(all the revenue is listed transparently at https://assembly.com/coderwall/financials and more detailed breakdown for October is here: https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-fin...)

1. Job postings: companies pay to list jobs to the community. ($99 for a 30 day posting)

2. Ad partnerships. One is a retargeting partnership with Perfect Audience that pays about $15,000/month – and another is partnership with New Relic where users can deploy New Relic and get a coderwall t-shirt (and NR pays Coderwall per deploy)

I actually think Coderwall could be a much larger business than it is given the strong, active userbase, and the community is working on that. If you have questions about this, ping me at austin@assembly.com

I see. Thanks for the numbers. Ugh I hate ads so much, but clearly they're pretty lucrative in the right situations.

BTW Assembly is a very interesting concept, and your pinned tweet is hilarious. Might have to investigate it more once I get further.

Founder of JobBoard.io here. Job boards can be a great way to supplement monetization of a niche audience. Expect it to take a while to build traction, but when you do it can be quite valuable. I agree you should start by not charging for posting.

Once the audience is built up, by specializing and being in a niche you should be able to charge MORE for postings than a more generic job board.

We put together a pretty comprehensive blog post a while back on the topic of job board marketing and promotion, you may find it useful:

http://blog.jobboard.io/post/44541289000/how-to-promote-your...

It covers things like email marketing, social and using backfill to beef up your inventory....hope this helps!

Thank you! That article is great.

Not easy to answer without more detail. Monetisation depends on the type of people you have visiting. StackOverflow had a lot of difficulty monetising with adverts for books from Amazon, which they concluded was because people come there looking for free stuff, rather than to buy things (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...). Other sites find this works well.

Who are your main users and why would they come to the site? Teachers? If so, what level - school, college, postgrad? Managers who purchase stuff for the teachers, maybe?

I would imagine you will also have to take into account the skills being demonstrated on the site and the value they have to employers. If your site will attract the best and brightest (e.g. top coders on StackOverflow) whom employers want to recruit, then I think the job listings would be more valuable than if it's mostly made up of people looking for free stuff to save themselves the hassle of making it themselves.

It's not really about traffic, it's more about the quality of the audience. People posting job listings (really just a special type of ad, BTW..) at a premium cost are very keen to know demographic information about who's looking at those listings. Are they in the right regions/locations? Are they the right level? Are they a group that even engages with job ads? That audience could be as small as 1000 or as large as a million to be worthwhile paying for.

Your best bet if you don't have a strong feel for things is to allow free listings initially and then offer upsells (for example, a fee to have the listing mentioned on the site's Twitter account or in a single, tasteful link on the homepage).

There's really nothing wrong with just offering paid slots and letting the buyers decide if they're worth it.

Agreed, but it's time-expensive and $$-expensive to build a site without a viable financial model.

I'm firmly against ads, and I'm not a fan of VC until that viable financial model is figured out.

You can create an out of the box job board with SimplyHired if you want to test without building anything: http://www.simplyhired.com/partners-overview

Very cool, didn't know this existed. I'll have to check out out. Thanks!

Depends on your niche.

If you are catering to a very select, focused audience then you don't need volume, because the specificity is your selling point.

There is a lot more than traffic that companies look for in a job board. Since your site is based around educational content, try to find profitable, untapped markets related to this and focus on only those markets at the beginning.

You can be creative with this: for example, hedge funds routinely pay top dollar to find the best PhD students in math-related subjects, so maybe there is a way to bring both together.

Interesting. As it turns out, the site will be structured to show users content based on the particular tag combination they select.

So if they've selected #math #machine-learning #chaos #san-francisco #startup #phd, they'll be in a very focused group.

That's not really going to take off. You need to be THE math/machine-learning job board. You need to be top-of-mind with job boards.

Minimum traffic, maybe 1 hit/month. Honestly I've seen people go to paid listings off the bat and then they aggregate from other places to get the ball rolling.

It works but you have to put in effort, it's a massively saturated market.

Have a look at which cities craigslist charges for, how much it charges, and for which specific kinds of jobs.

For example, http://portland.craigslist.org/ charges $25.00 to run a "software / qa / dba" ad for a month, but nothing at all to run such an ad at http://spokane.craigslist.org/

It's not really the traffic that counts, but conversions. How much money do _you_ really need? Are you working full-time on this? If not you might be better off to charge little or nothing, so as to build market share.

Most job boards don't do much to market themselves, other than maybe send some spam. There's a lot you could do yourself. Suppose you have a local job board, you could show up to MeetUp groups and the like to promote your board, pass out handbills in public places, send flyers around to student employment offices at universities.

You won't need much traffic at all, if the people doing the hiring are able to find lots of qualified candidates through your board.

This is a highly competitive area. There are bazillions of job boards, however most of them totally suck, so you have the opportunity to do well by doing good.

I appreciate your thoughts.

The market I'm targeting is college students. The site functions as the missing guidance/career counselor to guide them through school in the area of their choosing.

The edge is that it's a somewhat scaleable form of mentorship because mentors don't have to repeatedly spend time to have influence once they're on the site.

Example: students looking to major and work in software engineering follow the software engineering 'channel' where they see all the top books, videos, resources, etc. that top software engineers found critical to their own formal + informal education.

The goal is to be a powerhouse for this type of content, and the job board is an ancillary benefit that might help visitors. Traditional ads aren't an option. Hence my curiosity in other options.

Anyway, I imagine the people on this site would be highly qualified.

Great point about charging little to nothing and then building from there. Kind of obvious, in hindsight, but in never occurred to me!

Never underestimate the power of junk mail. Er... direct mail.

Send paper posters around to the departmental offices at as many schools as you can. It would not be hard to compile the postal addresses yourself, however you can rent such mailing lists quite cheaply. A "tested" list, which is regarded as high-value, rents for ten cents per name or so, but a "compiled" list, as this would be, is much cheaper, like one cent per name.

However if you have specific contacts at a school, and can address a cover letter to the contact by name, they're more likely to actually help you out by putting your poster up in a visible location.

Also consider advertising in student newspapers, student radio stations, as well as radio stations that while not run by students, are in the communities where schools are located.

Sometimes you can get free advertising just by sending around a thoughtfully-worded press release.

Hehe, true about direct mail. A scrappy approach is clever. I've reached out to my alma mater and they're generally not too difficult about posting items around campus.

Thanks a bunch for the tips!

Is your alma mater prestigious?

At least in the UK, major graduate recruiters that focus their efforts on particular schools are willing to spend on brand-building for surprisingly low-eyeball audiences (sponsoring specific student societies). You can then pitch a low traffic site with emphasis on the "set up by former and current XX students" angle to at least get badges on the site.

If your site is targeting current students, there's likely more revenue in brand-building "sponsored content" from major graduate recruiters than a pure jobs board since students, almost by definition, aren't actively looking for a job for most of the year. That doesn't make your revenue model easier...

In the US, it's uncommon for recruiters to focus on specific schools. I do see it done from time to time - specifically for Stanford, MIT and Berkeley - but it is uncommon.

Also they don't target specific schools that are just as good, if not better, like Caltech or Carnegie-Mellon, nor schools in other countries - like Cambridge or Oxford!

I ran a company in the college employment space for 7+ years. I recently shut it down. At our peak we had 150-200k unique visits per month and an email list around 10k. I was scraping by and making a living, but we weren't selling job postings directly for the most part. I've watched many dozens of startups in the space die. Although I learned a lot and helped a lot of people find jobs, I realize now that it's an exceptionally difficult space.

What was your differentiator?

that's the key - you need a differentiator. Not everyone has one at all; among job boards, it's quite common for them to be aggregators that just scrape other job boards. I don't find them to be useful.

Yeah. That's why I think a site bringing unique value that happens to have jobs listed might have a fighting chance, whereas a site intended to be a job board that tries to make itself uniquely valuable will struggle.

I'm aiming for the former.

I have some bad news for you.

My own site is your direct competitor:

http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/

I don't intend to make money from my job board, rather I hope to find a job myself, in part because the job board will help my SEO if it gets organic links, and in part because some of those who get jobs through my site, might one day hire me, or retain me as a consultant.

As for your own job board, it would be helpful were you to post technical articles for the CS students. Not so many people visit job boards unless they're actually looking for a job, but lots of people like to read articles. Once they're at your site, then they'll notice your job board at the same site.

One thing I don't understand is about Indeed.com. I think (not sure) that it was an aggregator. 2 points: 1) was/is that legal - to just scrape other sites and use it? 2) it supposedly sold to recruiter.com for $1B. Can anyone confirm that? I was told it by someone.

Yes, that's true. I was actually surprised that they didn't exit for more. Ask question 1 again and replace Indeed with Google.

He he, I thought of that just before clicking submit, but was also interested in your reply.

I wrote the company profiles myself. I found all kinds of companies with jobs that weren't posted on any other job boards. Growing an initial audience was the easy part for me because my site was very different from other job sites. Monetizing while continuing to grow the site was what killed me. I relied too much on SEO, and one of Google's whims essentially put me out of business. Most of the startups in the space that I saw fail couldn't even get an initial user base.

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