Audience By Acquisition

January 16, 2008

Prompted by Trinity Mirror’s 1.9 million pound acquisition of The Career Engineer, I thought it would be interesting to do some calculations on the ‘cost of buying a job seeker audience’.

The following table shows the approximate ‘cost per unique user’ for eight job boards purchased in recent years. Figures for acquisition prices have been taken from trusted press sources, while unique user figures are based upon ABC Electronic audits made close to the acquisition period.

Job Board Acquisition Analysis

Period	Purchaser	Job Board	Acquisition Price (millions)	Monthly Unique Users	Cost Per Unique User
Mar 2005	DMGT	Jobsite	£35m	882,570	£39.66
Aug 2005	Trinity Mirror	GAAPweb	£10.45m	81,003	£129.01
Oct 2005	Trinity Mirror	HotOnline	£47.6m	1,067,323	£44.65
Nov 2005	Trinity Mirror	SecsInTheCity	£3.3m	39,326*	£83.91
Oct 2006	Dice	eFinancialCareers	£48m	1,124,978	£42.67
May 2007	Trinity Mirror	TotallyLegal & TotallyFinancial	£11.8m	104,463	£112.96
Aug 2007	DMGT	JobsGroup.net	£11m	267,483	£41.12
Jan 2008	Trinity Mirror	The Career Engineer	£1.9m	70,533	£26.94

* estimated from 2003 and 2006 audits.

As shown, the ‘cost per unique user’ varies quite significantly, from just under £27 to just over £129, averaging out at approximately £65.

If you come from a online marketing or advertising background a figure of £65 will seem quite high (and it is, Google paid $82/£42 per unique user for YouTube), but it’s important to remember that gaining an audience is only part of an acquisition aim. Each acquisition is obviously unique, but gaining a client base, a technology platform or expertise can be just as important as gaining an audience. If we make an assumption that, typically, gaining a job seeker audience accounts for 25% of the price, we can reduce the ‘cost per unique user’ down to £16.25 (25% of £65). Sure, it’s still high, but much more reasonable.

What else can we gleam from our analysis? Well, the most recent purchases by both DMGT and Trinity Mirror seem to be good deals. DMGT’s acquisition of JobsGroup.net was only fractionally higher, in ‘cost per unique user’ terms, than their purchase of Jobsite over two years earlier. Trinity’s latest purchase of The Career Engineer looks to have been more cost effective (again in ‘cost per unique user’ terms) than previous purchases.

As I’ve pointed out, there are many other factors that influence these types of acquisitions, but as a publicly available metric the ‘cost per unique user’ is a worthy guide.

Disclosure: The author has previous been employed by a Trinity Mirror property (GAAPweb) and has consulted for the group’s Digital Recruitment Division.

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© Photographer:Craig Mckay | Agency: Dreamstime.com

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4 Comments »

1. […] to confirm financial details of the deal, we’ll keep you posted. If we use the logic of our earlier analysis (which finds DMGT paying about 40 GBP per unique user) the price tag would have been between 10 and […]

   Pingback by Broadcasting Online Recruitment News (born) » DMGT Acquires OilCareers.com — February 12, 2008 @ 10:26 pm

2. Some very intersting points in this article and a very good run down of buycost cost vs users, however you have a broken link, JobsGroup.net points to jobsgroup.co.uk

   Comment by Dave — April 7, 2008 @ 10:37 am

3. Dave, thanks for your comments and for spotting the broken link, which has now been corrected.

   Comment by Julian Stopps — April 10, 2008 @ 9:15 am

4. […] to see how new job boards can make a solid profit nowadays. What’s more, in the heyday of job board acquisitions the average ‘cost per unique users’ was as little as £27 (and it’s likely to be far less […]

   Pingback by Broadcasting Online Recruitment News (born) » Job Board ROI — March 17, 2010 @ 6:09 pm

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