Update: DirectEmployers says it uses Google Analytics for its traffic counts. “Quantcast code is installed on only 162 of the more than 40,000 domains we have operational,” reports DirectEMployers spokeswoman Nancy Holland in an email this morning. “In the future we plan to have all .jobs domains tracked by Quantcast.”
DirectEmployers Association, operator of the 40,000 site strong .Jobs Universe, says its network of job boards has welcomed more than half a million visitors in the first three weeks after its launch.
The 550-member association launched an initial few thousand sites the second week of January, and has added thousands more since. The sites are all on the .jobs domain and were the focus of a lengthy battle over the use of geographic, occupational, and combination names in conjunction with the .jobs extension. (The background is available here.)
In its announcement, DirectEmployers said the job board network has some 800,000 jobs from more than 89,000 employers and is growing rapidly. Employers can list jobs at no charge. These are then redistributed among the sites according to the location of the position, and the nature of the job.
DirectEmployers offers this example: “A Providence Health & Services listing for Nurses in Seattle will be distributed to multiple relevant websites, such as www.seattle.jobs, www.nursing.jobs and www.seattlenursing.jobs.”
Those sites all branch off the main site, USA.jobs, which is where the job searches are conducted. not directly accessible.
According to Compete.com and Quantcast.com, two independent traffic measuring sites, USA.jobs received significantly under 100,000 unique visitors during the last four weeks.
Quantcast put the number at 88,300 unique visitors for the period Jan. 19-Feb. 18. Compete put the number at 20,776 uniques for the month of January. (The sites don’t offer compatible time periods for comparison.)
DirectEmployers may be counting traffic differently than either of those sites. I sent a note asking the contacts listed on the announcement for clarification of the visitor count. I’ll update this post when I hear, which DirectEmployers says will be next week.
The Quantcast counts, according to DirectEmployers, don’t correctly reflect the actual traffic because Quantcast code is not installed on all 40,000 of the .jobs sites. The 500,000 unique visitors was counted by Google Analytics. (See the update at the top of this post.)