Internet major Yahoo is shedding its weight further. It has just announced its decision to sell its job listings site HotJobs to competitor Monster Worldwide Inc (MWW), a career and job content provider, for $225 million in cash.
With this sale, Yahoo will move out of the online recruitment business. The deal, subject to U.S. Department of Justice approval, will make Monster a bigger player in the business with only Careerbuilder.com as the real rival. In fact, Monster expects to overtake Careerbuilder.com as the biggest job listings company.
Currently, Monster controls about one-third of online job postings in the US where the current unemployment level remains at around 10 percent. HotJobs market share is relatively smaller.
Monster expects to establish the top position in the U.S. as a result of the deal, said Timothy Yates, Monster’s EVP and CFO. According to comScore, CareerBuilder led the job search site category in February 2009 with 12.2 million visitors followed by Monster’s 9.5 million visitors and HotJobs’ 7.7 million.
The sale of HotJobs, expected for a while now, will give Yahoo “the ability to focus more on its core business,” Yahoo said in a statement.
The two firms also announced they signed a three-year agreement making Monster the exclusive provider of career and job content on Yahoo’s U.S. and Canada homepages. Yahoo believes the sell-off and traffic deal will benefit its newspaper consortium partners.
Under the terms of the deal, Monster will pay Yahoo $20 million to $31 million a year to redirect traffic to the Monster site.
HotJobs generates annual revenue of about $100 million. Monster’s 2009 revenue totaled $905 million.
The price of the acquisition, $225 million, is far less than the $445 million which Yahoo paid when it bought HotJobs in 2002.
Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz has been reorganizing the internet company by hiving off divisions ever since she took over in January 2009. The HotJobs sale is the latest example. Last month, Bartz sold Zimbra email business to VMware Inc (VMW), and struck a deal to let Microsoft Corp (MSFT) handle its site’s Internet search technology, in an effort to refocus the company on Internet media and advertising and reignite growth.
Monster also will double the number of newspapers that it works with to about 1,000. Monster and HotJobs each have deals with newspaper websites for displaying online job ads.