Would Employ Media Really Create a Million Job Boards With .Jobs Domain Name Extension?

The .jobs domain name scandal continues to brew. The for profit Employ Media in alliance with the non-profits Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and DirectEmployers Association is attempting to expand the .jobs domain charter it obtained five years ago. Under the existing charter, quality employers like American Airlines are able to register and use domains such as AmericanAirlines.jobs if they feel that would make it easier for job seekers to get to the career sections of their web sites. The expansion would allow Employ Media to create an infinite number of new .jobs domains and either use the names themselves, sell them to other organizations under terms which are not open and transparent so some organizations may be denied while others are accepted at differing terms, or a combination of the two. In addition, domains such as Diversity.jobs and Nursing.jobs would be created even though there already exist job boards such as DiversityJobs.com and NursingJobs.com.
Dozens of job board association members, human resource professionals, employers, and other stakeholders have already used the template posted to CollegeRecruiter.com to voice their objections to the proposed expansion of the charter and I suspect that we’ll see dozens more before the deadline of this Thursday, July 15th. It takes only a few minutes to copy the template, paste it into the body of a new email, edit it to include your organization name and contact information, and email it to ICANN.

To some (not me), the most troubling aspect of the proposed expansion of the charter is the potential creation of hundreds of thousands and maybe even a million new job boards owned and operated by Employ Media. I received an email this morning from someone who wondered if that was likely. I think he was wondering if the creation of a million new job boards on top of the already existing 100,000 was even economically feasible. Sadly, yes.
I’ve heard that the creation of each new .jobs domain names costs Employ Media about $0.25 per year. Whether that’s in the right ballpark or not isn’t really important as you’ll soon see. What is clear is that the creation of the first .jobs job board will cost them significantly more than the creation of the second, tenth, hundredth, or millionth. Once you create the first, each additional is far less expensive because they’re created like bakers use cookie cutters. The first cookie in a bakery costs the owner a lot of money as she needs to buy the building, install the ovens, hire staff, etc. but the second cookie costs next to nothing. The same is true with cookie cutter job boards. The first will cost Employ Media a pretty penny, but each one after that is virtually free.
Let’s assume that Employ Media creates a million job boards. At $0.25 per pop, that’s an investment of $250,000. Not cheap but also not a king’s ransom. So how do they make money from the creation of a million job boards? Easily and plentifully. Even if the vast majority of the sites are super niche like SeattleSoftwareEngineer.jobs, those sites only need to attract dozens of visitors a day to create a windfall for Employ Media. The reason? They can make money without selling advertising to employers. They’ve already gone on record as saying employers will be able to post jobs to the sites at no charge and that makes sense because Employ Media needs the content from the employers in order to suck in the job seeker traffic. So if SeattleSoftwareEngineer.jobs has hundreds or even thousands of software engineering jobs in Seattle then you can be sure that Google, Bing, and the other search engines will rank it highly on a search for software engineering jobs in Seattle. Makes sense. It should be ranked highly as it is highly relevant to the search.
So SeattleSoftwareEngineer.jobs attracts a hundred visitors a week. How does that translate into profit? Well, Employ Media almost certainly would run ads on the site promoting things like continuing education. Any user of just about any job board has seen the offer. “Click here to request information from [insert the name of your favorite on-line school here].” The job seeker pays nothing but the job board makes about $10 to $20 per average request because the school pays for the lead. So even if only 100 job seekers visit SeattleSoftwareEngineer.jobs a week and even one of them requests that information, that’s $10 to $20 per week in revenue for that site. Now multiply that by a million job boards and you get $10 million to $20 million in revenue per week or $520 million to $1.04 billion in revenue per year. Not bad. Not bad at all.
The bottom line is that Employ Media is sitting on a gold mine IF it can get ICANN to agree to expand its charter. It will just about instantly transform itself from an organization which is almost unknown in any industry to perhaps the biggest job board player.
I’ve been in this industry since 1996 so I’ve seen a lot of good ideas come and go. I’ve seen even more bad ideas come and go. Competition is sometimes scary but generally welcome as it forces all of the players to get better or perish. I don’t object to Employ Media’s plans because they may create a million job boards or make a billion dollars a year in revenue should they succeed. But even though I don’t object on those grounds, I know many do. And those who object for whatever reason need to act by this Thursday. Just email ICANN to voice your objection to the proposed expansion of the .jobs charter.