How Does Indeed Make Money?
A number of people have asked me this question in response to my post on Indeed from several weeks ago.
Fortunately Paul Forster, CEO of Indeed, has laid out the basics of Indeed's sponsored jobs offering in this post on Blog Indeed.
If you take a look at this Indeed results page, you can see what Paul is talking about.
The listing with the light blue background at the top of the search results is a sponsored advertisement. The sponsored listings on the right sidebar are additional sources of revenue.
It's a very natural revenue model. As Paul explains in his post:
The advertiser only pays for clicks on the sponsored advertisements, while clicks from the same jobs in our natural results continue to be free. Job seeker referrals are highly qualified because sponsored jobs are ranked by relevance as well as by bid. Conversion rates - from sponsored clicks to applications - are also extremely high because the advertisement landing pages are the individual job descriptions on the advertisers’ own websites.
Thanks for that explanation Paul. We are enthusiastic about Indeed's revenue system because, like the PPC systems invented by Overture and Google, it is a very natural extension of the search experience and advertisers have shown that they are happy to pay for performance.
June 5, 2006 05:43 AM, By Fred Wilson
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Comments (5)
I'm a little confused about why you didn't choose this as your logo: http://007google.com/Indeed.aspx
Posted by bobo , June 5, 2006 11:40 PM
In the screenshot above, 5 out of 5 of the Sponsored "Links" are for job boards. Presumably, Indeed is crawling and indexing all of the boards that are advertising. So, what is the incremental value to the job seeker in that example? If Indeed's results algorithm is displaying the best jobs on the results page, why would a user leave Indeed and redo the search process on Dice, et. all which is only a subset of the available jobs? Less text and white space actually increase the user experience, not detract from it. So, cramming superfluous text on the page actually has a negative impact on the algorithmic results presentation. Suppose its possible to argue that Google could restrict its Ad Words listings that its syndicating to supporting ads rather than competing listings (such as books on Java), but thats a dangerous bet to make in terms of relying upon a (competing) third party to make that change in product strategy.
Posted by Anonymous , June 6, 2006 05:53 PM
I think you answered your own question by mentioning Google.
Google does the same thing.
And its incrementally valuable to the user for the following reason:
Pay per click advertisers are incentivized to find relevent keywords to advertise against, or else, what's the point?
This may or may not have as much to do with the search as much as it has something to do with the user.
So, if I'm doing a job search for lifeguards, the goverment might want to sponsor a job for Navy Seal opportunities... not something I was looking for, but certainly something that might pique the interest of someone who can swim well.
Posted by Charlie , June 13, 2006 12:26 PM
There is a lot of information out there. Much of it is recycled and outdated. If you want know how to make it in online money then you should totaly check out the Rich Jerk ebook. He also updates the information all the time.
You can get it here
http://www.2rich2work.com
Posted by Prichard , August 11, 2006 02:24 AM
Pay-for-performance is here to stay. Corporate clients demand it and local merchants understand it's value. Systems like ppc and ppl (pay per lead) allow the merchant to accurately gauge and compare their marketing efforts. Recently, we moved from a monthly subscription model to a per-lead model and found we had happier customers and more revenue in the door.
STeven Cox
Founder, CEO
Click For, Inc. - Local Search
Posted by Steven Cox , June 5, 2006 10:10 AM