Analysis of Traffic Patterns in Online Employment
Jobster sent a Cease and Desist letter to RecruitingBlogs.com owner, Jason Davis. It's yet another social media mistake that will start off small and turn into something much larger.
In this case, you can see that Alexa has a steady downward trend for Recruiting.com. Alexa ratings are't great, but the trends to be very accurate. Maybe if Jobster, who just recently came off two bad PR event occasioned by their mishandling of the publicity of company layoffs and a run-in with the Joel Cheesman, spent more time working in the online employment community, that traffic trend would be in the opposite direction.
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For an instructive comparison, let's take a look at the number for the new executive editor for Recruiting.com, John Sumser.
Notice any similar trends? John took over for Recruiting.com and started submitting Interbiznet stories and articles. His traffic rose, beating Recruiting.com, and then both sites continued their plunge.
Could it be John's campaign to clear out the riff-raff when he first started that caused Recruiting.com's decline? Sumser wrote a series of insulting articles where he mocked bloggers and called them names - the very people he was supposed to be joining in community.
So now Jobster says that Jason Davis is competing with them and causing their problems with traffic decline. Let's look at RecruitingBlogs.com
At first glance, they may have a point. It looks like the traffic from recruitingblogs.com directly impacts the traffic from recruiting.com. but on close inspection, what you see is a a general trend that mirrors each site. For every spike in traffic that Recruiting.com and interbiznet.com has, a similar spike occurs from recruitingblogs.com. In other words, the trends are community trends. Traffic rises based on events in the blogosphere, and the more sites the more traffic. The more sites, the better for Recruiting.com.
In plain english, what is good for one recruiting site is good for another, but especially for a recruiting blog aggregator. That's how highly connected communities work. The growth of recruitingblogs.com should be a good thing for Jobster. Instead, they are going to turn it into a very negative story, one of a supposed Web2.0 company trying to crush an individual blogger because their definition of competition is no one else gets to play in their sandbox.
In other words, a Web 2.0 company is acting in a manner that is the very antithesis of Web 2.0.
Bad move, Jobster.
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