Monster announced yesterday that it is laying off 15% of its workforce, or roughly 800 people. The announcement followed the release of their quarterly financials - Q2 earnings dropped 28% even though revenue was up 20%. Looks like costs have gotten somewhat out of control. And no wonder, considering the fact that Monster’s ability to keep visitors coming to its site has become increasingly difficult and increasingly costly. Perhaps they’ve gone too far in the overly-rich deals they struck during the past year or so with newspaper sites and other media properties around the country. Those career center micro sites, which siphon traffic away from daily newspapers for an exorbitant fee, now appear to be equally bad for both newspapers and Monster. Given the downward trend in traffic for both Monster and CareerBuilder, one would imagine that CareerBuilder is facing similar circumstances in their own operations.