Not surprisingly given the grim jobs report issued earlier today by the Department of Labor, LinkUp’s September jobs report showed that the U.S. jobs market continues to struggle badly. New job listings on LinkUp fell by 14% during the month and total job listings dropped by 7%. On a state by state basis, 38 of 50 states reported a decrease in new job listings (39 of 51 counting Washington, D.C.) and, even more alarmingly, 47 states showed a decrease in total job listings.

The Department of Labor reported this morning that the U.S. economy shed 263,000 jobs in September, far worse than the 175,000 that most economists were predicting. The nation’s unemployment rate rose to 9.8% and more than 15 million Americans are currently out of work. Since the recession began in late 2007, 7.2 million jobs have been lost.

LinkUp, the fastest growing job search engine on the web according to recent ComScore data, only indexes job listings that are found on company websites. The September jobs report was based on a comparison between August and September job listings from 16,861 corporate websites around the U.S. As a result of this unique data source, LinkUp’s job listing data includes no duplicate job listings, no classifieds from recruiters or headhunters, and no phishing or scam ads. Even more importantly, the jobs data is based on actual job openings that companies list on their own company website rather than the openings that companies are advertising for on other job boards or in newspapers.

In terms of the best and worst performing states, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Nevada reported the largest percentage declines in job losses, while Texas, California, and Minnesota experienced the largest declines in the actual number of new and total job listings.

Just over a month ago, the New York Times ran a story about a job scam in Minneapolis and yesterday, the State of Minnesota sued the firm and its CEO Barry Trimble for scamming hundreds and perhaps thousands of job seekers. The firm, The Arthur Group, posted ads on Careerbuilder and other job boards and searched online resumes in order to bait job seekers into coming into the office for a mock interview and a free review of their resume. After thrashing the unsuspecting job seeker, The Arthur Group would try to sell a range services to help the job seeker ‘gain a competitive edge in a difficult job market.’ After shelling out thousands of dollars, job seekers received no job offers, interviews, or assistance of any kind. The state is suing Trimble and The Arthur Group for consumer fraud and deceptive trade practices and the Attorney General hopes that victims will see some sort of restitution as a result of the suit.

I do, too. An even better outcome would be that Trimble and others like him get thrown in jail. There are job scams all over the place, and they’ve gotten much worse in the current economy. Crooks like Trimble are going to continue to rip people off and steal their money until there are real consequences for their actions. Almost as important, the job classified industry has to do a better job of policing itself and calling others out when they witness behavior that helps perpetuate consumer fraud.

When a free weekly jobs newspaper runs postal job scam ads in every single one of its weekly papers every single week of the year for a decade, there should be an industry-wide tarring and feathering that shames them into stopping the ads. When job sites charge job seekers for access to job listings that are free elsewhere on the web, they should be called out so forcefully and vocally that their businesses are forced to deliver real value or shut down. And job boards that run ads for career-related services should do a better job of screening their advertisers, removing ads when consumers complain about scam ads, and making sure that everyone in and around the industry is aware of and can specifically ban those advertisers. Similarly, job aggregation sites that pool job listings from other job boards need to do a better job of filtering out job scam ads.

Employers, too, need to pay closer attention to and be more discriminating about the kinds of publications and sites in which they run their recruitment ads. If employer advertisers showed more concern and were more willing to use the weight of their ad dollars, behavior in the industry would change very quickly.  And finally, the media needs to continue highlighting these kinds of deceptive, fraudulent practices so that consumers are aware of the risks that are inherent in posting their resumes to job boards and using pay-to-post job boards, job board aggregators, and the services that are advertised on them.

Apple delivered a valuable lesson on corporate ethics with its recent decision regarding the ‘I Am Rich’ iPhone application. Unfortunately, the lesson was apparently lost on the Employment Guide.

With the release of version 2.0 for the iPhone, developers began releasing new iPhone applications via the Apple App Store. It didn’t take long before Apple was faced with its first controversy in working with 3rd party developers when a German developer began selling an application called ‘I Am Rich.’ The application was nothing more than a picture of a ruby that buyers could purchase for $999 (the maximum price Apple allows for an iPhone application) and place on their phone to show it off as some kind of bizarre status symbol. Allegedly, 8 people purchased the application and a few complaints trickled in as people claimed they errantly bought the app through Apple’s 1-click system. Within a day, Apple pulled the application off its App store. While some might argue that Apple should not limit the market by imposing restriction on developers, there is little doubt that Apple made the right call. It’s a model that should serve other corporations well, the Employment Guide in particular.

Unlike Apple, which elected to place the interest of its users above its own economic interests, the Employment Guide continues to run job scam ads (the postal jobs ad is the worst among them) that do nothing except prey on unknowing, uninformed jobseekers. I have written about this issue before (here, here, here, and here), and will continue to do so until the Guide stops aiding and abetting these fraudulent advertisers.

These ads that the Guide runs in every issue in every market every week of the year, most likely constituting their single largest single advertising segment, stand as a perfect example of corrupt corporate morals. They are also a heinous stain on the weekly employment newspaper industry and the Guide should be vilified by jobseekers, employers, competitors, bloggers, and consumer advocates for their wanton disregard for their readers. Almost immediately after Apple was made aware that an application made available through their platform was ripping off its customers, they pulled it. It’s a great example of a company demonstrating not only strong ethical behavior, but also acting to preserve the long-term interests of both itself and its customers. Then, there’s the Employment Guide.

The Employment Guide has, without question, received thousands and thousands of complaints over the years from angry readers who were duped out of the $24.99 they sent to obtain federal government job applications that are freely available through government sites. The Guide knows the ads are fraudulent. The Guide knows it is victimizing its readers. And yet, they continue to run the ads week after week in every edition around the country because they simply cannot give up the revenue. It’s not only a shame, I’d say it’s a crime. I just hope that whoever buys the Employment Guide understands the enormous discount that should be applied to the massively tarnished, permanently impaired asset.

Some nice articles today on JobDig and LinkUp from Cheezhead and ERE’s Michael Glenn.

Thanks for the coverage!

Last month, a French court ruled that ebay must pay $61 million to LVMH for allowing the sale of fake luxury goods on its site. Though ebay is appealing the ruling, it’s a fascinating case that is garnering widespead attention for its implications on how business is conducted on the web. There are good arguments to be made on both sides of the issue, but I basically feel that sites like ebay should make reasonable, good-faith attempts to prohibit sales of the types of merchandise at issue in the ruling. The site should not be required to bare unreasonable costs to do so, but the auction site and others like it should be required to implement reasonable, appropriate, and sensible policies that attempt to prohibit, block, or remove from the site such transactions. I will clearly admit that I have no idea exactly what those policies, technologies, or restrictions would look like and what impact they might have on ebay’s business model, but my guess is that we’ll soon find out thanks to the French court.

In some ways, the same issues inherent in the ebay ruling are akin to those that could be applied to a media company running advertisements for its clients/advertisers. What responsibility does a media company have to screen its customers and the products or services they are advertising? It’s a tricky, complex topic with few easy answers. But despite the grayness surrounding the issue, there are, without a doubt, some easy answers that at least begin to bring a hint of clarity to the issue. Unfortunately, not all media companies choose the right side of those easy answers.

The Employment Guide continues to run scam ads, the worst of which is the postal jobs ads that run every week in every single issue of the Employment Guide nationwide, that take advantage of the most vulnerable in our society and prey on ignorance and desperation. I’ve written about this topic quite a bit over the past few years, and will continue to do so until the Guide and other newspapers stop running these heinous ads. There is absolutely no question, none whatsoever, that the Employment Guide is fully aware of how fraudulent the advertiser is in this case (it takes a 5 minute phone call to figure it out). That alone makes them guilty of aiding and abetting a criminal.

But even worse, the company running the postal ads is undoubtedly the Employment Guide’s single largest customer, spending what I’d estimate is somewhere between $500,000 – $1,000,000 per year with the Guide (50+ markets, $200-$300 per week, 52 weeks a year). That fact alone places an even higher level of responsibility on the Guide to ascertain the legitimacy of their biggest customer. The fact that they blatantly shirk this responsibility to their readers, their employees, and their legitimate advertisers (however few remain) is a testament to both how negligent the Guide is and how desperate they are for revenue. The French court would undoubtedly rule against the Employment Guide in this case. At the very least, anyone considering buying the Guide should substantially reduce their offering bid to account for the facts that not only is the Guide’s largest customer a fraudulent company, but the Employment Guide has engendered years of ill-will among its readers and customers by running these horrendous ads.

Surprising no one since all of the other bidders had dropped out, NBC, with support from Blackstone and Bain, purchased the Weather Channel and Weather.com for just under $3.5 billion. Landmark Communications, a private equity group owned by the Batten family and owners of the Weather Channel as well as a number of daily and weekly newspapers including the Employment Guide, had expected to sell the cable channel for $5 billion when they placed it up for sale in January. It’s unfortunate that they had to sell in such a dismal capital markets environment, but still a very nice return for a company that was started in 1982.

And now the real fun starts – seeing what kinds of prices their daily and weekly newspapers will fetch. Of particular interest will be the Employment Guide. As I’ve written previously, my guess is that Landmark would be happy with anything even close to $30 million.

Always one step ahead of everyone else, Cheezhead has declared that he has moved beyond ripping Monster, declaring in an early June podcast that he no longer finds it sporting, fun, or even interesting. I still, however, cannot resist. Monster has lost its leadership position in online classifieds to CareerBuilder in large part because the company has persistently neglected its users, always considered short-term revenue to be a far higher priority than long-term revenue and a quality user experience (annoying pop-up ads, job scams, etc.), and failed to transition from a 1.0 job board to a 2.0 job board. Furthermore, the company has made a pile of suspect acquisitions and engaged in illegal activity to enrich its executives through options backdating. It’s been one blunder after another for Monster over the past 5 years or so, and while it may no longer be surprising to anyone that the company is mismanaged and well on its way to being an ‘also-ran,’ Monster remains a large company in the space with decent mindshare (albeit largely negative).

In any event, Monster has been in the news recently with two significant announcements. Monster announced that it was shuttering its social networking site Tickle.com, a company that it had acquired for $70 million in 2004. That’s $70 million in shareholder’s money that they flushed down the toilet. Whether the idea was bad from the start or poorly executed after the fact (I suspect it’s a lot of both), the fact of the matter is that the Tickle debacle is another black eye for Monster. The $61 million acquisition of Affinity Labs will undoubtedly share the same outcome.

Monster also announced this week that it had formed an ad network with 19 newspapers. I am not sure yet how this announcement differs from Monster’s previous announcements that it was working with local daily newspapers (here and here and here). As I have said in the past, these partnerships between print and online media companies make sense in theory in that jobseekers and employers can access and deliver job classifieds across multiple media channels depending on their preferences. Unfortunately in practice, however, neither Monster nor the dailies deliver value to either party. And these partnership deals are miserable for the companies striking the deal. The dailies who sign on with Monster are simply throwing in the towel on a vital revenue stream, and Monster is tying its fortunes to a sinking ship. As the saying goes, mating two dinosaurs does not result in a gazelle.

As I have written about previously, Landmark Communications has put its media assets up for sale. In addition to The Weather Channel, the crown jewel of the group, the private equity firm owns a bunch of small and medium-sized dailies and community newspapers, shoppers and weeklies, and the Employment Guide. Lehman Brothers, who is handling the transaction, has split the assets into two groups – The Weather Channel and Weather.com in one group, and eveything else in the other.

Bids for the The Weather Channel were due a few weeks ago, and according to Multichannel.com, Time Warner has dropped out of the auction and Landmark has entered into exclusive negotiations with a consortium that includes NBC Universal, Blackstone, and Bain. Their bid reportedly included $1.8 billion in equity and $1.7 billion in debt for a total of $3.5 billion, well below the $5 billion asking price.

If the top bid for a premium asset like the Weather Channel was 30% below expectations, wait until the bids come in for Landmark’s daily and weekly newspapers. I’d be surprised if the print assets end up being sold as a block, and my guess is that the Employment Guide will fetch a price somewhere between 25-50% of the asking price. Using a very quick and crude, back-of-the-envelope calculation, I’d guess that that number is somewhere between $25-$35 million (my best-case estimate is revenue of $50-$60 million, slightly positive EBITDA (maybe) although they get favorable distribution subsidies from Dominion, the distribution company also owned by Landmark, and break-even or negative net income. I will say, however, that if the Employment Guide is struggling as badly as they appear to be in the markets where we’ve seen them, these numbers are all way too optimistic). The numbers are obviously just a guess, but it will be interesting to see what happens in the next few months.

As detailed in a new study by Yankelovich in association with Sequent Partners, traditional media delivers a significantly more positive impression on consumers than digital media. The study, entitled “When Advertising Works” was released yesterday and tested people’s reactions to various advertisements across 16 media channels. The traditional media, which included TV, billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, and movie theater ads, generated a positive response from 56% of the survey respondents as compared to only 31% from digital media. 13% of survey respondents reported a negative reaction to the traditional media versus a 21% negative response to the digital media ads. As to the reasons behind the findings, J. Walker Smith, president at the Yankelovich Monitor division of Yankelovich in Atlanta explained,

“A principal reason for those results was that for ads that made an impression, consumers using traditional media were in a more positive mood and more likely to be interested in entertainment and relaxation. By comparison, consumers using digital media were more likely to be in busy moods, seeking control or solving a problem and they were more likely to be by themselves. In contrast, traditional media are often watched, listened to or read by people in groups.”

Smith further explained that consumers are not as accustomed to seeing ads in digital media and may not be as receptive yet to those advertisements. Whatever the reasons for the findings, the study should serve as a shot in the arm to everyone who naively lumps all traditional media together and/or dismisses the value that those media channels still deliver.

As the New York Times story reported, Smith is a strong advocate of multi-faceted marketing campaigns that take a multichannel, multimedia approach. He recommends that the best strategy for marketers is to combine both digital and traditional media, leveraging the best aspects and attributes of each.

I couldn’t agree more.

As if dancing around onstage like a drunken buffoon wasn’t enough, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer followed it up by declaring that all media will be delivered over an IP network within 10 years. Though there are a ton of enormous ramifications to that prediction (ever read a book, Steve?), one of them is that there will be no print media of any kind in 2018. Despite the rapid obliteration of the daily newspaper industry (focusing solely on what Ballmer’s ridiculous comments entail for print), it’s a preposterous statement akin to declaring that we’ll all be driving solar-powered land cruisers and carrying light sabers by 2018.

Not that Ballmer’s patently ludicrous remarks warrant refutation, but two recent studies show that even while the dailies are imploding, print itself remains a wildly viable media platform. A recent study by Alloy Media+Marketing reported that 82% of college students read their college newspaper, a rate double that of the average daily newspaper. Another study by The Media Audit reveals that 43.8 million U.S. adults have read an alternative newspaper in the past 30 days and that readership among the 117 papers surveyed in 88 markets around the U.S., readership grew by 3% in 2007. And as Erik Sass reports, daily newspapers in smaller communities are not only surviving the web-induced media tumult, they are succeeding quite nicely these days even in the face of the current economic downturn.

Metro dailies are most certainly dying, and within 10 years, many will undoubetdly be dead. Most of those that do manage to survive will, in fact, be delivering their content over the web, and only a small handful of dailies will be printing a paper in 10 years. But print itself continues to deliver tremendous value for both media providers and media consumers, albeit in appropriate channels, and Ballmer’s claims to the contrary simply erode Microsoft’s already dilapidated credibility.