Ask HN: How much traffic does a job board site need for paid listings?
I'm working on an educational content-centric site as a side-project. I'm considering partly monetizing it with job listings.
Assume there are different areas on the site for everything from computer science to math to art to physics etc.
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?
I know this is still very vague, but any ballpark numbers?
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadI'm firmly against ads, and I'm not a fan of VC until that viable financial model is figured out.
For example, 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/
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.
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!
Send paper posters around to the departmental offices at as many schools as you can. It would not be hard to compile the postal addresses yourself, however you can rent such mailing lists quite cheaply. A "tested" list, which is regarded as high-value, rents for ten cents per name or so, but a "compiled" list, as this would be, is much cheaper, like one cent per name.
However if you have specific contacts at a school, and can address a cover letter to the contact by name, they're more likely to actually help you out by putting your poster up in a visible location.
Also consider advertising in student newspapers, student radio stations, as well as radio stations that while not run by students, are in the communities where schools are located.
Sometimes you can get free advertising just by sending around a thoughtfully-worded press release.
Thanks a bunch for the tips!
At least in the UK, major graduate recruiters that focus their efforts on particular schools are willing to spend on brand-building for surprisingly low-eyeball audiences (sponsoring specific student societies). You can then pitch a low traffic site with emphasis on the "set up by former and current XX students" angle to at least get badges on the site.
If your site is targeting current students, there's likely more revenue in brand-building "sponsored content" from major graduate recruiters than a pure jobs board since students, almost by definition, aren't actively looking for a job for most of the year. That doesn't make your revenue model easier...
Also they don't target specific schools that are just as good, if not better, like Caltech or Carnegie-Mellon, nor schools in other countries - like Cambridge or Oxford!
I'm aiming for the former.
My own site is your direct competitor:
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.
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.
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.
So if they've selected #math #machine-learning #chaos #san-francisco #startup #phd, they'll be in a very focused group.
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 and more detailed breakdown for October is here: https://assembly.com/coderwall/posts/coderwall-s-october-fin...)
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
BTW Assembly is a very interesting concept, and your pinned tweet is hilarious. Might have to investigate it more once I get further.
It works but you have to put in effort, it's a massively saturated market.
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).
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...
It covers things like email marketing, social and using backfill to beef up your inventory....hope this helps!