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Richard Johnson, the chief executive officer and founder of job and career site Hotjobs.com, has stepped down. Johnson will still serve as the company’s chairman, so it doesn’t look like he’ll need to take advantage of his company’s services yet. The company has promoted its chief operating officer, Dimitri Boylan, to the position of acting CEO. Job sites such as Hotjobs have been among the few dot.coms that are actually benefiting from the sector’s shakeout. Laid-off employees have been flocking to job and career web sites in the hopes of finding a new position. According to a recent report by Alexa Research, traffic to Hotjobs.com received 178 million page views between December 2000 and January 2001, making it the No. 2 U.S. job site after Monster.com.
Pogo.com finds a
company to play with
EA.com, the online branch of video game company Electronic Arts, has
acquired game site Pogo.com for $42 million. Excite@Home had been in
negotiations to buy Pogo for $150 million, but the deal fell through in
January. Media Metrix declared Pogo.com 2000's stickiest site. Pogo users spent an average of
175.8 minutes a month on the site. With 17 million registered users, Pogo.com is and will probably remain a
free site, but EA.com hopes to convert some of the game-players there into
paying EA.com customers. EA.com will unveil a fee-based set of games on
its own site this month. The site will charge $5 to $10 to play games
including Electronic Art’s role-playing game "The Sims" and
games which feature characters from the wildly-popular Harry Potter novels.
EA.com has projected that it will become profitable by Spring 2002, but
that estimate could change now that it has shelled out $42 million for
Pogo.
Two airlines say no to
web commissions
As of Thursday, Northwest Airlines and its ally KLM Royal Dutch
Airlines will no longer pay commissions on online ticket sales to travel
sites. The airlines had been paying a 5 percent commission to travel sites
such as Travelocity. The commission was capped at $10. It’s bad news for
travel sites, since commissions from all airlines accounted for as much as
20 percent of their revenues. So far, no other airlines have
followed Northwest’s and KLM’s example. But the change could
foreshadow the future of online airline ticket sales, since Northwest and
other major airlines plan to launch an online travel outlet of their own,
called Orbitz. As a result of the elimination of the commission,
Travelocity.com has imposed a $10 service charge on Northwest and KLM
flights. Travelocity’s official line is that its ticket prices are still
reasonable, even factoring in the $10 surcharge, since nonvirtual travel
agencies often impose fees of about $20 or more per ticket.
Report: Wireless statistics are
off the wall
Judging from the wide discrepancies in data, research on the number of
wireless internet users is unreliable at best, according to a report in
which researcher eMarketer cites data from 100-plus research organizations
and consultancies. EMarketer says that even the precise number of U.S. wireless
users today is all but impossible to determine. Researchers who project
future wireless use are pulling numbers "out of thin air from hot
air," according to eMarketer. The discrepancies can be stunning: Merrill Lynch,
for example, projects that there will
be 161 million users of wireless internet technology in 2004, while IDC
puts the number at 40 million. Figures on wireless ad spending are also
uselessly inconsistent, eMarketer says. According to the Yankee Group, $7 million
was spent on wireless advertising last year, a figure that it says will
balloon to $6.1 billion in 2005. Forrester Research, in contrast, reports
that less than $1 million was spent on wireless advertising in 2000, and
$890 million will be spent in 2005.
House ads on the rise
online
Thirty percent of ads that run on entertainment and society web sites
are house ads, according to a recent study by Jupiter Media Metrix. Citing
data from AdRelevance, Jupiter notes that 22 percent of ads on news and
information sites were self-promotional, and 19 percent of ads on portals
were house ads. The study also notes that the number of self-promotional
messages increased during the course of the year 2000. About 15 percent of
online ads were house ads in early 2000, compared to 28 percent by year’s
end. The Jupiter study also claims that online ad clutter is destined to increase.
By 2005, the study predicts, consumers will be bombarded with 950
marketing messages per usage day, further diluting the effectiveness of
all online ads. This year, users will face 705 marketing messages each
day. Many of the house ads, the report notes, are used as space filler.
The report suggests that web sites should place their house ads more
strategically.
IOC to admit net
journalists to Winter Olympics
Internet journalists have passed their drug screening, so to speak: The
International Olympic Committee has deemed them eligible to cover the 2002
Winter Games in Salt Lake City. Sports sites find this victory sweet in
light of the fact that they were not granted press credentials for the
Summer Games in Sydney. However, the press has not traditionally covered
the Winter Games as zealously as the Summer Games, so there isn’t as
much demand for passes to the Winter Games. Fifteen sports sites from all
over the world were awarded credentials, including Yahoo Sports from the
U.S. Journalists for ESPN.com and CNNSI.com did not receive press
credentials because they were able to cover even the Summer Games with
credentials bestowed upon their parent companies. Other sports sites that
the IOC gave access to include French site Sport24.com and British sites
Sportal Network and Sports.com.
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