We’re not calling anyone an economic sadist, mind you.  It’s only that, as Heather Hopkins reported, "This year visits to websites in the Employment and Training category were 17% higher than in January 2008."  And some individual sites are seeing particularly huge gains.

 (Credit: Hitwise)

Indeed "experienced an 88% increase in share of Internet visits year on year in January," according to Hopkins.  Also, "Other fast movers include Snag a Job up 99%, LinkedIn up 138%, the Unemployment Office for Ohio up 184% and Simply Hired up 151%."

Meanwhile, Career Builder is actually king of the employment sites category in terms of market share, and Yahoo HotJobs, Monster, USAJOBS, and Job.com are all members of the top 10 list, so it appears that there are plenty of users to go around.

Good for the sites.  Just remember to stay a little suspicious of any macroeconomic recommendations you find posted on their official blogs.

If It Looks Like An Ad They Ignore It

Editor’s Note: Studies are great and all, but sometimes real-world examples are more powerful. Have you recently redesigned your site and seen drastic results? Let us know how you did that in the comments section.

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen, who’s been studying how people interact with webpages since there were webpages to interact with, follows up on previous explorations to show once again that people not only ignore content that looks like advertising, but need things plainly spelled out for them.

The task was simple enough: find the country’s current population. Nielsen even gave them the website to use. But 86 percent of users failed to find the answer even though it was displayed in large red letters in plain sight.

"Users tend to ignore heavily formatted areas because they look like advertisements. Thus, about 1/3 of users never even saw the Population Clock. However, most people did fixate on this area because it’s not as overly formatted as most promotional features. So, most users saw the Population Clock; they just didn’t use it, even though it contained the exact information they were looking for."

Okay, so a third doesn’t exactly make up 86 percent. Why did the others fail when, in my grandmother’s language, if it was a snake it woulda bit them? There are many reasons, but a large chunk of it, says Nielsen, lies in the language.

Most users scanned the big red number U.S. 302, 781, 150, as of today, but only made it to 302 before skipping off to the search box labeled "Population Finder" or some other area. (Or in one case, a man after my own heart, frustrated with poor site search, said "forget it, I’m going to Google.")

The big red number was labeled "Population Clocks," which isn’t exactly an intuitive label. It sounds more related to time than it does to number of people. It’s a classic case of leveraging core competencies rather than using your strengths. As users didn’t automatically grasp what a population clock was, they skipped it.

The suggestion here then is that a simpler label of "Current US Population" would have worked much better, giving the user what the user expects, which is the end goal.

Andy Beal, editor and Internet marketing consultant for MarketingPilgrim.com has another take on it, which might make sense to you. Users may have taught themselves not just the look and feel of advertising, but also the location of advertising.

"The study demonstrates that it’s not just paid ads users are filtering from web sites, but areas that might contain ads. Web users are conditioned to focus on the main area of a web site, when looking for meaningful information.

"They’ve been taught that the areas to the left or right are typically reserved for navigation or advertisements. As Neilsen suggests, it’s important to make sure important information is located in the area of the web page users expect to find it." 

Ventures is concerned that Partners is infringing on its trademark.  “Ventures, firm of the well-known Internet investor Fred Wilson, has a higher profile, and even comes up first in Google results when you search for the other firm,” reports VentureBeat’s Matt Marshall.

As for that list of accomplishments?  I’m unable to produce one for Partners that sounds half as nice.  “But the firms have been confused several times by outsiders, and [Ventures] wants to stop it,” Marshall notes.  I don’t blame Ventures, and I’m actually (legal stuff aside) a bit grateful – I’ve already had to check this article for errors on several occasions.

The lawsuit doesn’t name any dollar figures (a PDF was provided by peHUB’s Dan Primack) – the first few requests that Ventures makes of the court merely entail ending the similarities.  The suit does go on to request, however, that the court “[d]irect Defendants to account to Plaintiffs for their profits and order that Plaintiff recover its damages arising out of the aforesaid acts of infringement in a sum equal to three times such profits or damages (whichever is greater) . . .”

Still, don’t expect the lawsuit to interfere with day-to-day operations at either firm, and really don’t expect it to bother any of Ventures’s investments; this should remain a behind-the-scenes battle.  And as with many of these lawsuits, there’s no telling how many weeks, months, or years it may be before a resolution occurs.

By providing the AppFactory service, Bay feels it can get promising projects onto a fast track toward developing a finished product. A well-crafted application that gains traction with Facebook users could be the core of a new business.

“The creation of an operating system, or a platform, has always led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications that are optimally designed for that platform and its user base,” said Bay partner Salil Deshpande in a statement. “Bay wants to find the killer apps.”

If they do find those applications, the return on one that becomes widely-adopted will look very promising. Facebook has a userbase that Bay pegs in the range of 29 million. If someone could grab one-tenth of one percent of those users, that’s a nice base of some 29,000 people upon which to build.

Layoffspace: A "Network For The Unemployed"

Its co-founder, Jake Ludwinski, explained to Red Herring how he (and his brother, Maciej) came up with the idea.  "People who are unemployed are really down on themselves," he said.  "They have all this time on their hands.  What do they do with it?  We need a place where we can get them together."

Layoffspace might, in an ideal world, be that place.  It all comes back to unemployed people being "really down on themselves," though; given the stigma often associated with being unemployed, users may be hard to attract.  The current state of the site – its forums are pretty much ghost town – speaks to this problem.

Another possible deal-breaker is the site’s insistence that visitors register.  Try as you might to scope out various groups, blogs, or job boards, Layoffspace will (after allowing you to click around for a few minutes) insist that you enter your first name, last name, e-mail address, password (twice), and deal with a CAPTCHA.

Alternatively, Layoffspace’s lack of users might just be a symptom of its newness – the site was only launched late this past April.  And the Red Herring interview does briefly address that problem.  "The brothers plan to introduce advertising once the site build traffic – hopefully in a few months," wrote Ken Schachter.

It would seem that, for the time being, sites such as Indeed and LinkedIn still deserve top billing, but for the truly unemployed (i.e., people with nothing to do but hunt for jobs and network), Layoffspace might be worth a look.

Job hunters now have one more site to add to their bookmarks alongside Simply Hired and Indeed. It’s called Hound, and its Juriscape owners tout the site’s simplicity and interface, and a large database of listings, as positives.

As dogs go, this Hound needs a little more training. With a motto of "Every Job On Earth" displayed beneath a friendly dog logo, we expect to see results. A query on Hound for pediatrician in Lexington, KY got us a ‘no results’ page.

The same query on Indeed picked up a half-dozen openings. Simply Hired found seven.

Bad dog. Or maybe we should just call it ‘beta dog’ instead. As a new launch they are likely still implementing some features like additional sources for listings.

Hound’s toolset makes it easy to personalize the way a person receives listings they want. Options for email or RSS feed updates as jobs matching a query become available.

A Browse Jobs feature lets the visitor check out listings for the United States and its territories. It’s another area where Hound needs work; omitting Louisville from Kentucky’s list of top cities for jobs is a glaring mistake.

More competition in the job metasearch range should increase the pressure on all sites in this category to become the definitive place to find those listings. If most listings for heavily searched positions duplicate closely across engines, it seems the site that can best establish itself as a brand will succeed long-term here.

See, Toni Basil on a stout-girl pyramid isn’t enough to make the new generation stop in their channel-flipping tracks. And when so many other networks aren’t fully taking advantage or even grasping the transformation taking place, Viacom seems, after a lot of time on the innovating bench, ahead of the game.

Interactivity is the name of said game, and keeping the attention of the ADD generation takes a lot of work. But this is the way all of it is going: completely interwoven content.

In April, MTV is working with Yahoo! to allow users to submit their own movie spoofs as a part of an MTV Movie Awards promotion. One will be selected as the winner of the "Best Movie Spoof—User Generated" award on the show, from five user-nominees.

During the live broadcast on June 3, the awards show will be tied in with Web surfers, whose (edited for content – and always very, very deep) comments will appear on the so-called World Wide Web Wall, or as Downtown Julie Brown used to call it, the wubbawubbawubba.

"Viewers are constantly telling us they want to dig deeper into the content they see on-air, and they are obsessive about following our programming from one platform to the other — and back," said Christina Norman, President of MTV.

"When the TV show ‘The Hills’ inspires a community of fans to connect with their favorite cast members and devour exclusive content online and on the handset, the payoff for viewers is a more immersive experience all the way around."

MTV.com streamed 84 million videos in January, and over 85 million in February, this year, increases of over 200 percent year-over-year. On average, the site gets about a million visitors a day.

We’re waiting to hear back from Yahoo about the Pipes service vanishing from the Internet.

(UPDATE!: 5:40 pm ET – We just heard back from Yahoo, and this is their statement on the state of Yahoo Pipes:

]]> http://www.webpronews.com/yahoo-pipes-vanishes-2007-02/feed 1 http://www.webpronews.com/indeed-hits-a-million-per-month-2006-08 http://www.webpronews.com/indeed-hits-a-million-per-month-2006-08#comments Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:23:56 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=31064 Job search engine Indeed.com pinged me to brag on themselves a little. The company has broken the million job seekers per month barrier, a 300 percent increase in 2006.

The upswing in traffic puts the job engine, which ranked sixth among online employment services in January, nearly on par with the number of career hopefuls digging around AOL and MSN (via CareerBuilder.com, which holds a monstrous – get it? – lead over everybody).

That CareerBuilder was in first place as well as fourth and fifth, may indeed raise Indeed up to fourth place overall.

Those million job seekers conduct about 25 million searches per month at Indeed, a figure the company says is over three times more than direct competitors, citing comScore. I’m not sure what they mean by “direct competitor,” though. It’s hard to imagine they’ve outsearched CareerBuilder, Monster and Yahoo.

The success of the site, which uses a pay-per-click network to monetize it, has netted the company about 150 paying clients and partnerships with heavy-hitters like the New York Times, Boston.com, About.com, A9.com, and Gawker Media.

Recently the company added a host of new features to its core search functions. Those additions include email job alerts, RSS job search feeds, jobs by Instant Messager, Firefox and Google job search plug-ins, advanced search refinement, job search management with my.indeed, job trends and salary research.

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]]> http://www.webpronews.com/indeed-hits-a-million-per-month-2006-08/feed 0 http://www.webpronews.com/job-search-asia-and-the-pacific-2006-07 http://www.webpronews.com/job-search-asia-and-the-pacific-2006-07#comments Mon, 03 Jul 2006 13:31:21 +0000 WebProNews Staff http://www.webpronews.com/?p=30138 The Recruit.net search engine can find jobs for coders in China, analysts in Australia, and system administrators in Singapore.

Visitors to the beta version of Recruit.net search engine have a trilingual option for their job searches: English, Chinese, and Japanese. Currently, job seekers can review opportunities in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, and India.

The site has a similar look and feel to US-focused job search startups like SimplyHired and Indeed. Recruit.net culls job opportunities from thousands of international job sites.

Searchers can save their queries as alerts, and receive updates via email or RSS as new openings become listed on Recruit.net. Results of a search are filtered for duplicate listings by default. Recruit.net will also suggest ways to refine a search, like “system administrator unix” for “system administrator.”

Another component called “My Recruit.net” lets users create an account and upload a rsum for employers to review. Job alerts and previous searches can be tracked through the account as well.

Employers can sign up to do rsum searches through the database. Also, employers or other advertisers can opt to sponsor targeted advertising on a cost-per-click basis on Recruit.net on the site.

The company’s blog cited a growing market for online job listings as one reason for building its service. The usefulness of the Internet as a medium, and being able to deliver a job posting to thousands of job candidates, should help Recruit.net as online job postings increase throughout the region.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

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