
Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings? - m52go
I&#x27;m working on an educational content-centric site as a side-project. I&#x27;m considering partly monetizing it with job listings.<p>Assume there are different areas on the site for everything from computer science to math to art to physics etc.<p>How much traffic to the relevant area would I need (e.g., computer science) in order for a company (e.g., Google) to consider paying for a job posting?<p>I know this is still very vague, but any ballpark numbers?
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awwstn
I work at Assembly and have paid pretty close attention to Coderwall, which
might have some lessons for you.

Coderwall has around 500,000 unique user sessions per month, and it's all
software developers. They monetize in a few different ways.

(all the revenue is listed transparently at
[https://assembly.com/coderwall/financials](https://assembly.com/coderwall/financials)
and more detailed breakdown for October is here:
[https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-
fin...](https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-finances))

1\. Job postings: companies pay to list jobs to the community. ($99 for a 30
day posting)

2\. Ad partnerships. One is a retargeting partnership with Perfect Audience
that pays about $15,000/month – and another is partnership with New Relic
where users can deploy New Relic and get a coderwall t-shirt (and NR pays
Coderwall per deploy)

I actually think Coderwall could be a much larger business than it is given
the strong, active userbase, and the community is working on that. If you have
questions about this, ping me at austin@assembly.com

~~~
m52go
I see. Thanks for the numbers. Ugh I hate ads so much, but clearly they're
pretty lucrative in the right situations.

BTW Assembly is a very interesting concept, and your pinned tweet is
hilarious. Might have to investigate it more once I get further.

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cmalpeli
Founder of JobBoard.io here. Job boards can be a great way to supplement
monetization of a niche audience. Expect it to take a while to build traction,
but when you do it can be quite valuable. I agree you should start by not
charging for posting.

Once the audience is built up, by specializing and being in a niche you should
be able to charge MORE for postings than a more generic job board.

We put together a pretty comprehensive blog post a while back on the topic of
job board marketing and promotion, you may find it useful:

[http://blog.jobboard.io/post/44541289000/how-to-promote-
your...](http://blog.jobboard.io/post/44541289000/how-to-promote-your-job-
board)

It covers things like email marketing, social and using backfill to beef up
your inventory....hope this helps!

~~~
m52go
Thank you! That article is great.

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mattgibson
Not easy to answer without more detail. Monetisation depends on the type of
people you have visiting. StackOverflow had a lot of difficulty monetising
with adverts for books from Amazon, which they concluded was because people
come there looking for free stuff, rather than to buy things
([http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-
advertising...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising-
experiment/)). Other sites find this works well.

Who are your main users and why would they come to the site? Teachers? If so,
what level - school, college, postgrad? Managers who purchase stuff for the
teachers, maybe?

I would imagine you will also have to take into account the skills being
demonstrated on the site and the value they have to employers. If your site
will attract the best and brightest (e.g. top coders on StackOverflow) whom
employers want to recruit, then I think the job listings would be more
valuable than if it's mostly made up of people looking for free stuff to save
themselves the hassle of making it themselves.

------
petercooper
It's not really about traffic, it's more about the quality of the audience.
People posting job listings (really just a special type of ad, BTW..) at a
premium cost are _very_ keen to know demographic information about who's
looking at those listings. Are they in the right regions/locations? Are they
the right level? Are they a group that even engages with job ads? That
audience could be as small as 1000 or as large as a million to be worthwhile
paying for.

Your best bet if you don't have a strong feel for things is to allow free
listings initially and then offer upsells (for example, a fee to have the
listing mentioned on the site's Twitter account or in a single, tasteful link
on the homepage).

------
mischanix
There's really nothing wrong with just offering paid slots and letting the
buyers decide if they're worth it.

~~~
m52go
Agreed, but it's time-expensive and $$-expensive to build a site without a
viable financial model.

I'm firmly against ads, and I'm not a fan of VC until that viable financial
model is figured out.

------
redmattred
You can create an out of the box job board with SimplyHired if you want to
test without building anything: [http://www.simplyhired.com/partners-
overview](http://www.simplyhired.com/partners-overview)

~~~
m52go
Very cool, didn't know this existed. I'll have to check out out. Thanks!

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jblesage
Depends on your niche.

If you are catering to a very select, focused audience then you don't need
volume, because the specificity is your selling point.

There is a lot more than traffic that companies look for in a job board. Since
your site is based around educational content, try to find profitable,
untapped markets related to this and focus on only those markets at the
beginning.

You can be creative with this: for example, hedge funds routinely pay top
dollar to find the best PhD students in math-related subjects, so maybe there
is a way to bring both together.

~~~
m52go
Interesting. As it turns out, the site will be structured to show users
content based on the particular tag combination they select.

So if they've selected #math #machine-learning #chaos #san-francisco #startup
#phd, they'll be in a very focused group.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
That's not really going to take off. You need to be THE math/machine-learning
job board. You need to be top-of-mind with job boards.

------
marketingadvice
Minimum traffic, maybe 1 hit/month. Honestly I've seen people go to paid
listings off the bat and then they aggregate from other places to get the ball
rolling.

It works but you have to put in effort, it's a massively saturated market.

------
MichaelCrawford
Have a look at which cities craigslist charges for, how much it charges, and
for which specific kinds of jobs.

For example,
[http://portland.craigslist.org/](http://portland.craigslist.org/) charges
$25.00 to run a "software / qa / dba" ad for a month, but nothing at all to
run such an ad at
[http://spokane.craigslist.org/](http://spokane.craigslist.org/)

It's not really the traffic that counts, but conversions. How much money do
_you_ really need? Are you working full-time on this? If not you might be
better off to charge little or nothing, so as to build market share.

Most job boards don't do much to market themselves, other than maybe send some
spam. There's a lot you could do yourself. Suppose you have a local job board,
you could show up to MeetUp groups and the like to promote your board, pass
out handbills in public places, send flyers around to student employment
offices at universities.

You won't need much traffic at all, if the people doing the hiring are able to
find lots of qualified candidates through your board.

This is a highly competitive area. There are bazillions of job boards, however
most of them totally suck, so you have the opportunity to do well by doing
good.

~~~
m52go
I appreciate your thoughts.

The market I'm targeting is college students. The site functions as the
missing guidance/career counselor to guide them through school in the area of
their choosing.

The edge is that it's a somewhat _scaleable_ form of mentorship because
mentors don't have to repeatedly spend time to have influence once they're on
the site.

Example: students looking to major and work in software engineering follow the
software engineering 'channel' where they see all the top books, videos,
resources, etc. that top software engineers found critical to their own formal
+ informal education.

The goal is to be a powerhouse for this type of content, and the job board is
an ancillary benefit that might help visitors. Traditional ads aren't an
option. Hence my curiosity in other options.

Anyway, I imagine the people on this site would be highly qualified.

Great point about charging little to nothing and then building from there.
Kind of obvious, in hindsight, but in never occurred to me!

~~~
WillyF
I ran a company in the college employment space for 7+ years. I recently shut
it down. At our peak we had 150-200k unique visits per month and an email list
around 10k. I was scraping by and making a living, but we weren't selling job
postings directly for the most part. I've watched many dozens of startups in
the space die. Although I learned a lot and helped a lot of people find jobs,
I realize now that it's an exceptionally difficult space.

~~~
m52go
What was your differentiator?

~~~
MichaelCrawford
that's the key - you need a differentiator. Not everyone has one at all; among
job boards, it's quite common for them to be aggregators that just scrape
other job boards. I don't find them to be useful.

~~~
m52go
Yeah. That's why I think a site bringing unique value that _happens_ to have
jobs listed might have a fighting chance, whereas a site intended to _be_ a
job board that tries to make itself uniquely valuable will struggle.

I'm aiming for the former.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
I have some bad news for you.

My own site is your direct competitor:

[http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/](http://www.warplife.com/jobs/computer/)

I don't intend to make money from my job board, rather I hope to find a job
myself, in part because the job board will help my SEO if it gets organic
links, and in part because some of those who get jobs through my site, might
one day hire me, or retain me as a consultant.

As for your own job board, it would be helpful were you to post technical
articles for the CS students. Not so many people visit job boards unless
they're actually looking for a job, but lots of people like to read articles.
Once they're at your site, then they'll notice your job board at the same
site.

