POST PORTAL
Monster.com CEO Jeff Taylor is enjoying a banner year. First off, Monster, the online job-listings and career-advice hub, became profitable, clearing $1.2 million on $48.5 million in 1998 revenues. Second, its Babs/Monica and Super Bowl ads proved that TV works as a direct-marketing tool for online services - traffic to the site spiked by the thousands in the minutes after the ads appeared. What's more, Monster's in beta with a "talent auction" that, in Taylor's humble words, "will put job seekers in complete control for the first time."
Be that as it may, Monster.com best speaks to another story - the hype surrounding "vertical portals." Portals, of course, began life as search engines. They helped you find the info, goods, and services you wanted, and passed you along to relevant sites and merchants. They have since tried various means, like customization (think My Yahoo!), to entice you to stick around - "stickiness," in the trade. Next up are vertical portals - category killers that specialize in one subject area and seek to provide everything you could possibly want on that subject. As such, Amazon is a books portal and Monster a jobs portal. Increasingly, Taylor says, users are going straight to the verticals. "They don't use keyword searches for things like books," he says. "They go directly to Amazon."
For proof, he points to his site. "Our traffic is continuing to go up, but our traffic coming from the portals has plateaued," he says. In other words, both job hunters and headhunters are going to Monster without passing go. If this trend continues, Taylor says, the market may flip, and today's eyeball aggregators might end up paying the "verticals" to win users back.
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