Buy-It-Yourself

Since the do-it-yourself approach taken by most newspapers venturing into the online employment advertising market was rather pitiful, the only other option left is: buy-it-yourself. It’s sort of a Microsoft approach to business development. Associated New Media (ANM), owner of the Daily Mail newspaper in the UK, has bought recruitment site jobsite.co.uk for £35 million. Jobsite is one of the UK’s largest online recruitment sites, registering 750,000 unique users on the site during January 2003 (source: dotJournalism). I foresee a bidding war among newspapers for the relevant independent national job sites in many countries as the reality sinks in: There is a business to be reclaimed that — while loudly announcing that it is leaving for good — was not hindered to do so. Oh well, it will just cost a bit more this way, right?