Alexa traffic analysis on Monster, LinkedIn, Jobster and more..

I'm doing some market research. Just ran this traffic comparison on Alexa. Thought it was worth sharing.

Before you give too much credit to the Alexa traffic data consider this...Many Thanks to The Chad.

This compares the traffic of the following sites over the passed 6 months:
monster.com, indeed.com, simplyhired.com, jobster.com & linkedin.com

It's been obvious now for some time that Monster of late is far from what it used to be. LinkedIn is a cool service if you have the time; still, I had no clue that over the past few months it has been competing with the big spender on traffic.

That’s pretty remarkable when I consider the fact that LinkedIn isn’t all over the TV and on every web site and pop-up that I come across.

For all the press that Jason Goldberg gets in the blogosphere, I expected Jobster to have more of a presence. I guess I’m not the only one who’s still unsure as to exactly what it is that Jobster does. In all fairness to Jason and Jobster, I just really haven’t had the time to sit down and look into it.

Comments

[jason goldberg]

a couple of notes.

1. alexa is off compared to comscore/media metrics.

2. at jobster we haven't spent a braincell on traffic yet. my attitude towards consumer traffic is first build a great product, second build a great product, third build a great product, 100th get traffic. we're about in step 2 right now with many more to go before we turn to traffic. which we will soon, just not yet. when we're ready for the world to know about jobster, it will. for now, the fact that every recruiter in the u.s. knows about jobster is enough -- that's who we sell to today and what we sell to them today is not based on traffic at all.

[Carl Chapman]

"the fact that every recruiter in the u.s. knows about jobster is enough -- "

You think they do? I don't. Also, if your intention is for every recruiter to know about Jobster, why? I haven't seen the compelling case for recruiters to use it, especially considering the cost. Can you help me understand?

[Chad Sowash]

To be fair, post some Hitwise or comScore numbers and credibility will be tons greater. I've never been a Alexa fan and some others are starting to catch on as well, link below..

http://www.ere.net/blogs/Hire_Calling/F7FD08C3787C47FCA9A1FED2195577E4.asp

While you're reading this you could also email Manster and provide some helpful blog SEO hints.. Wow, that URL is horrible... Slugs man, slugs.. ;o)

[Matt Martone]

Great contribution Chad. Thanks. I'm going to edit the post to mention Manster's and JD's research.

[Andy Kazeniac]

The Compete.com blog today has a post on the top 20 websites, ranked by unique visitors. One of the noteable sites falling out of the top 20 from last year is Monster.com. Here is a link to the post... http://blog.compete.com/2006/12/07/top-20-most-popular-websites-unique-visitors-new-absent/

And here is a shot of Monster.com's performance over the past year from Compete's Snapshot tool...
http://snapshot.compete.com/monster.com/

[Phil Carpenter]

Yep, the Alexa numbers are notoriously unreliable. But where Simply Hired is concerned, even the pricey data (e.g. comScore) doesn't include the traffic we receive from partners such as MySpace -- and I'm sure that others in the industry have similar issues. Conclusion: take these stats with a peck -- not just a grain -- of salt.

[Matt Martone]

Thanks Phil. So, Jobster and Simply|Hired have chimed in. I guess that just leaves it up to LinkedIn, Indeed and Monster.

I expect that Indeed will comment. LinkedIn may be too busy handling all of the press from the recent write up in Business 2.0.

[Paul]

According to Comscore MediaMetrix, Indeed.com gets 2.3 million unique visitors a month - this is close to our own internal stats. Compete shows similar figures for Indeed.com & allows you easily to run comparisons between sites:
http://snapshot.compete.com/indeed.com/

[cynical]

It's interesting to see how off the numbers for Indeed are with respect to their own internal stuff and what's shwon at compete. Indeed's own blog says the following (as of August 2006):

"Indeed.com now has over one million unique users and 25 million searches every month, over three times more than any direct competitor, according to comScore Media Metrix."

http://www.indeed.com/pressrel/indeed-expands-job-search-leadership.jsp

According to compete, in August 2006, Indeed had about 1.6 million uniques.

So something is not right here?

[Oswald Eppers]

Indeed clearly leaves behind other search engines, including so-called meta-engines like Jobster and SimpyHired. I made a comparison of major job search engines and indeed is the clear winner! Check out this page: http://2ajobguide.110mb.com/HP_enginecompUSA.htm

Apparently still people don't know this or is there something wrong with alexa statistics?

[Alexa ranking affects SERP ranking?]

A low ranking on Alexa does not indicate that the traffic is not being generated on www.google.co.in, www.search.yahoo.com and www.search.msn.com search engines.