JobsOnline.com CEO Peter Mason doesn’t look like a guy who should be running an Internet company, but he’s behaving like one.
The former corporate lawyer made himself at home in JobsOnline’s warehouselike office by throwing Oriental rugs on the bare lineoleum floor and ditching his well-tailored suit jackets.
“The more I got into this,” he says, “it was like flypaper.”
JobsOnline’s Web site is no less sticky. Since going live in late 1999, it has become one of the Web’s more heavily trafficked sites. It’s the leading independent career site, drawing more than twice as many visitors as Monster.com.
But don’t be misled. What attracted Mason to sign on as CEO wasn’t career services, but the Internet’s potential to collect information that can be sold into the growing sea of data flowing to marketers.
That’s a business Mason knows well.
The 48-year-old–one of the founding partners of Chicago law firm Freeborn & Peters–is a former CEO of May & Speh Inc., now part of Arkansas-based Acxiom Corp. May & Speh managed giant customer databases for companies such as Sears, Roebuck and Co.
Now Mason is making a run at building an online database leader atChicago-based Toplander Corp., the holding company for JobsOnline and a sister company, MarketsOnDemand, which sells data.”The Internet will forever change the way information is collected and disseminated in a mass market,” Mason says.
That now familiar rap was popularized by legions of dot-comers with more passion than business experience. Yet Mason and JobsOnline’s founder, entrepreneur Larry Organ, have spent more time building their business than evangelizing.
The firm only recently began to attract notice because it’s growing at a time when many Internet companies are shrinking. The firm is moving from River North to high-rise digs in the Time & Life building at 541 N. Fairbanks Ct.
Among its recent hires: JobsOnline President Tony Priore, a former senior executive at YesMail.com, a pioneer in permission-based e-mail and one of the firms that has been laying off workers.
But even as JobsOnline’s star ascends, the fast-changing Internet marketplace is throwing up new hurdles for the 60-employee firm.
Its business strategy–using free job-posting services to draw a large base of online visitors to collect potentially valuable information about them–is being pursued by hundreds of competitors including free sweepstakes sites.
These Web upstarts face a host of issues, not the least of which is the minefield of government regulation and consumer concern about Internet privacy.
As well, the market still is sorting out the value of data collected online, such as users’ e-mail and home addresses coupled with age, gender, occupation and other information.
Prices for e-mail address lists are dropping, just as rates for Internet advertising fell steeply last year.
“It’s a pretty crowded field,” notes William Blair & Co. analyst Abhishek Gami. “But it can be very lucrative for the companies that do actually add value to the data they collect and can help marketers target customers more efficiently.”
For now, Toplander appears to have some advantages, including Mason’s industry background and his relationships with offline players like Acxiom, which compiles and manages databases.
Toplander contends its information is better than that of competitors not only because it uses software to automatically verify addresses, but also because job-seekers are more likely to provide reliable information than, say, sweepstakes entrants.
And the company says its sensitivity to privacy issues will help it sidestep consumer backlashes.
“The real strength of our data is in its accuracy and completeness and the way its distributed,” Organ says.
For instance, Acxiom buys MarketsOnDemand’s databases to append e-mail addresses to its lists of home addresses. MarketsOnDemand gets 75 cents for every e-mail culled. Other data-compilers such as Nebraska’s InfoUSA scan for such supplemental information as gender.
MarketsOnDemand maintains so-called suppression files, so people who say they don’t want to get targeted e-mail are flagged as such.
The firm also creates specialized databases for corporate customers such as Citibank, America Online and EarthLink. For instance, it works with credit-data firms to append credit scores to lists of people who’ve said they want certain types of financial information.
“Offline companies have been selling this kind of information for years,” Organ says. But in the still nascent online market, “companies are paying a premium for accurate data.”
Nonetheless, Internet marketers are sorting out whether it’s more cost-effective to pay a premium to target prospects rather than, say, blasting banner ads all over the Web–the online equivalent of a billboard campaign.
“This is something we never even discussed in the early days of the Internet,” Gami says. “Yes, you can get the best possible data. But what’s the cost-benefit of doing so?”
So far, JobsOnline has managed to stay ahead of the Internet learning curve.
The firm was founded in mid-1999 with about $600,000 from Organ and a partner. Mason joined later, initially as an adviser.
By fall, they had built the Internet’s most visited career site and raised $10 million in equity financing from Chicago’s First Analysis and William Blair New World Ventures.
One reason their traffic built so quickly: Employers can post job openings for free–the online equivalent of putting a “help wanted” sign in a window.
Advertiser revenue funded the site’s early growth, and JobsOnline was profitable in last year’s second quarter. But Internet ad rates began falling precipitously around June. By then, they had begun developing MarketsOnDemand, which began selling information in September.
Toplander’s monthly sales are running about $2 million, split evenly between advertising and database sales. Ad revenue is falling; data sales are still climbing. Other revenue streams are in the works, and Mason expects Toplander to be profitable by midyear.
For now, he’s reveling in a job that reminds him of the thrill of starting fresh–the days in 1983 when he and several colleagues broke off from Rooks Pitts Fullager & Poust to start Freeborn & Peters, now a leading tech law firm.
At Toplander, he says, “I see us building an entirely online-sourced, compiled marketing database. … If we can do that … we will have created something many people will want to own. Our job is to build it.”
