Monster Changing its Stripes?

   

Perhaps Monster is listening after all.   

   

Joel’s made no secret of his feelings regarding Monster’s interstitial ads.  And last week, in round seven of the 2007 Top Sites for Job Search competition, Monster was “…a distant last-place finisher … booted from the competition … rife with misleading ads, and worse, uses interstitial ads to pad their revenue, ignoring the risk to consumers of phishing and identity theft.  Before using Monster, I think you need to ask yourself if you can entrust your personal data to a company that is willing to place you at additional risk if the price is right.”

   

Yet today, in Monster’s 2^nd quarter financial report, you’ll find the following nugget:

   

“The total revenue outlook for the balance of 2007 assumes that the rate of revenue growth in the third quarter will continue at approximately the same rate as in the second quarter, offset by planned reductions in certain interstitial ads and the elimination of "work-at-home" job postings, with a higher revenue growth rate in the fourth quarter.”

 

I guess there’s still hope for a reformed Monster.

   

Comments

[Andrew]

800 layoffs though :(

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003618291

non-sales related. So my friends in IT will no doubt get slaughtered.

[Bob Wilson]

Good point Andrew. I didn't intend to be unsympathetic to the folks facing layoff.

My experience with Monster is that they have many levels of management ... making it very difficult to get a decision, and then, once a decision is made, with no individual feeling accountable.

So I'm hoping that the layoffs, while painful for all inside the company, will result in a more nimble company that will achieve greater success in the long run.

Time will tell.

[Bob]

Good luck to all of the new job seekers that Monster is releasing into the market the best of luck in their search. Hopefully they will be able to leverage all of the new resources available to job seekers to make their searches quick and fruitful. There are plenty of companies out there who will be more than happy to hire many of them given the fact that unemployment is so low right now.

Like it or not, Monster is a big company and sometimes (usually) that means that they pursue big company priorities. It was only a matter of time before the market they had been taking from for so many years reached back and re-claimed some of the share that Monster had been abusing via Interstital ads, and other practices that all of the job seeking and recruiting bloggers have been talking about for so long.