Changing Reality on the NET

I always find it so interesting what information is hidden online and examining trends in the numbers.

Often when looking at various sites and recommending action to take I look at the history of the client's site along with a review of various competitor sites. For this feat I take you to a great online tool = The WayBack Machine. It offers a free service to view changes to sites and allows you to go back and see how they appeared years ago.

For today's voyage I am going to look at the recruiting giant Monster.com. From 2000 to 2005 there was a shift to the purpose of the site as they tried to navigate the changing structure of recruiting online. Originally it was designed to help job seekers find a great job with primary focus being on moving fairly detailed job description packages- but as years passed by the site slowly and surely became more focused with advertising in general.

Looking at the numbers for 03/04 vs. 03/05 (available from Monster in PDF)- Monster had 22,020,000 unique visitors that viewed 17.4 minutes a visit in 03/05 and 18,355,000 unique visitors viewing 20.5 minutes in 03/05. Page views remained almost identical- 27 per visitor in 05 and 28 per visitor in 04.

In twelve months the trend became more visitors looking at more ads rather than more time spent looking at jobs for visitors. Assuming a low cost per visit ad structure the difference became fairly significant from an ad revenue standpoint. But the lower time per visit also represents a shift in the quality of the time being spent looking at the *jobs*.

Were visitors simply uninterested or did they get lured away from the very purpose of the site by the advertising of some other service? At the cost of a hundreds of dollars per posting- you would believe that such a site would be trying to increase the value of the core product rather than detract from it with irrelevant advertising.