(Update for fact fix in fifth paragraph.)

Monster Worldwide has completed its acquisition of Yahoo’s HotJobs for $225 million cash, having met U.S. regulators’ scrutiny.

Concurrent with the closing, Monster will become Yahoo’s exclusive provider of career and job content on the Yahoo homepage in the U.S. and Canada, as part of a three-year commercial traffic agreement.

The deal adds about 600 U.S. newspapers currently on the Hotjobs platform to Monster’s affiliate network of 400 newspapers, for a local reach in about 1,000 newspaper markets in all 50 states. Monster had said from the outset that it would honor Hotjob’s deals with newspapers.

Still, there’s lots of work to be done. While the Yahoo deal is closed, there’s still the question of where newspaper affiliates on Hotjobs will ultimately reside. It’s unlikely Monster will support the Hotjobs platform indefinitely. (About 80 percent of Monster affiliates are on Adicio’s Careers platform . Technology provider Adicio supports on-boarding and feed management for many of Monster’s newspaper affiliates, which puts affiliates’ listings on Monster.)

The acquisition is “really a great benefit to small businesses and others who want that local penetration through our newspaper partnerships,” Monster’s Matthew Henson, VP of public relations, told us. “In terms of the next steps, we’re working through all that in the coming weeks. At the introductory level we plan to integrate by infusing the best of HotJobs and the best of Monster. Today marks the official close, and we will have more specific details on what the newspaper partnerships will look like.”

As for what the deal means to seekers and customers, Henson’s office prepared a handy FAQ (PDF) that gives them the top line. (We’d advise current and new affiliates to download it, and use it to answer your customers’ questions.)

“We are delivering on our strategy with the acquisition of HotJobs and the clear winners are our customers, job-seekers and shareholders,”  CEO and Chairman Sal Iannuzzi said in the company’s news release. “We now have a powerful one-two punch of scale and precision — the largest pool of seekers and jobs, coupled with our 6Sense semantic search technology that allows unrivaled ability to match talent and opportunities.”

“The completion of the acquisition of HotJobs by Monster is great news for users, customers, employees and partners,” Yahoo’s Jeff Kinder, SVP of media products and solutions added. “The combination of Monster and HotJobs offers a stronger service for all parties, with more employers, job-seekers and opportunities. The traffic agreement also enables Yahoo to continue to provide users with valued online career and recruiting services.”

Monster was expected to spend an additional $60 million to $90 million on the traffic deal with Yahoo. And while the agreement is exclusive to North America, it does give Monster the right to negotiate similar deals with Yahoo’s European and Asian properties.

As we reported after the deal was first announced in February, Yahoo’s vast network fits nicely with Monster’s own. The expanded reach is expected to give Monster a brand penetration of about 62 percent of the U.S. Internet audience, or about 130 million unique visitors.

In today’s release, Monster said that combining current, unduplicated Monster and HotJobs listings, Monster is “now the foremost source of job postings for employers in 19 of the top 20 industries and in 45 out of the top 50 cities as compared to any leading online career site,” according to Wanted Technologies. It defined leading career sites as Dice, Job.com, Jobing.com, LinkedIn, Monster, HotJobs, SnagAJob.com and CareerBuilder.

It’s too early to claim the No. 1 title, which CareerBuilder now holds.  In February, after the Monster-HotJobs deal was announced, a CareerBuilder spokesperson told us, “CareerBuilder has been the U.S. traffic leader since 2004 and will continue to be in the future.”

CareerBuilder’s North American revenue in 2009 was $542 million, compared to Monster’s U.S. domestic revenue of $407 million. (It’s a slight mismatch, as Monster lumps its Canadian earnings into international revenues and CareerBuilder doesn’t break out U.S. and Canadian in its North American revenues. Even so, no one disputes CareerBuilder’s U.S. revenue lead.)

Here is a link to more background on the deal. Most of it is clients-only.

(We’ll have  more for clients in our next Classified Intelligence Report.)