Online jobs in Decline as Mags Launch and Close

Good news for RBI owned Total Jobs which has topped the Hitwise rankings for most traffic in the online jobs market, beating Monster et al for the third year running.

Bad news for all of them however as Monster reports a fifth consecutive month of decline in job postings, including a massive 11% fall in December alone.

No surprise I guess that there are more people looking for fewer jobs.

Meanwhile, and arguably more surprising a number of b2b magazine launches announced this week, including Dennis launching a title for the b2b poker industry, whilst Centaur is continuing its process of culling underperforming magazines.

Note also a b2b mag launch in the finance sector, for wealth managers as online solution provider Citywire moves into dead trees for I think the first time. Amazing.

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Less than Total Jobs

The long wait for news on the sale of RBI is sapping morale of staff and managers according to insiders. Reed Elsevier CEO has sent recent email that confirms an announcement is expected imminently but the staff are less optimistic and fear that the credit crunch will delay a deal until after Christmas. Meanwhile I undersand that regional offices of star product, Totaljobs have been closed down just 18 months after they were opened.

The downturn has bitten traditional recruitment hard and it seems that job boards are not going to be immune.

Downturn starts to hurt Job Boards

The Guardian reports that Johnston Press is making eight redundancies as it closes the London sales office of its jobs board business.

It is hardly news that regional newspaper groups are having a tough time. but surprising that recruitment - and online recruitment at that, is in the firing line. In the pre online world, it used to be said that when GDP growth falls below 2%, there is a recruitment ad recession. It looks like that may be true in the on line world too.

We might pay particular attention to this news and whether it might mean that RBI's TotalJobs is also feeling the pinch and how that might affect the sale process.

Reed - but not in print!

Many are suprised that Reed Elsevier has annnounced the disposal of Reed Business Information. As a reader of this blog you should not have been. We predicted last year that there would be a series of business media disposals as the full horror of the shift in user and advertiser behaviour begins to manifest in revenues and profits.

This is a big deal though. RBI was created from many small trade publishers aquired in the late sixties and seventies. Originally the almalgam was the trade arm of IPC and for many years, until the early eighties traded as IPC Business Press.

In recent years RBI has tried to reinvent itself. Its blue chip magazine brands are not the power titles they once were. Paid circulations have collapsed, recruitment advertsing as vanished online and now display advertisers are also beginning to migrate to the web. The RBI management invented Totaljobs, whose revenue grew 35% last year, and have made a good fist of building what they call "community" websites. Never the less 60% of the RBI revenues are ad based on this fits uncomfortably with the Reed Elsevier digitial subs model so Crispin Davies wants to excise the cycle. Of course the thing about business cycles is that they go up as well as down. Timing is everything. Reeds subs based enterprises are never likely to enjoy 35% growth! This reaffirms Reeds desire to be the most boring media company on the planet. Also expect many more years of pretty dull share price perfromance but solid and dependable dividends.

Curiously the Reed desire for strategic purity does not stretch to the disposal of Reed Exhibitions. Although there is no online revenue and the revenue is all from marketing budgets, Davies has judged that the cash flow benefits of being the worlds largest trade show organiser are just too good to give up on.

For the folk at RBI an extended period of uncertainty looms. There will be no rush to do this deal. Indeed as Davies himself admits, the current credit shortage may make this £1b deal tough hurdle for private equity in particular. He will be patient. This is no fire sale.
What the employees can be certain of is that any new owner will be looking for cost savings. There is at least £10-15m of quick costs to come out based on my back of envelope calculations, and as print ads - 60% of RBI revenue, continue to decline the pain will go on for a long while.
We will come back to this in coming months, but for prospective buyers valuation will be tough. What are magazines "in long term slow decline" as the Reed statement puts it, really worth? How will a buyer view the generous employement contracts, the fantastic (if you work there) pension scheme, and the expensive (in rental terms) properties.

Is the value in RBI is break up? Totaljobs will have a very differerent valuation profile to Farmers Weekly.

Business media could not be at a more interesting juncture.