Posts Tagged ‘u.k.’

Johnston Press plc, one of the U.K.’s leading regional media groups announced on July 20 the appointment of Kjell Aamot as non-executive director of the company with effect from Aug. 1. Read the rest of this entry »

Ashenhurst Media is no stranger to niche job sites with a stable including SupplyChainOnline.co.uk and GreenJobsOnline.co.uk.

NowAcademicJobsOnline.co.uk joins the list charging £249 for a 28 day listing for jobs at universities and futher education.

LetPropertyRentProperty.co.uk launches for landlords and tenants alike in London and the Southeast of the U.K.

For £19.99 the service runs adverts on its own site as well as the major players (Rightmove, Zoopla, Globrix, Fish4 and Google Maps) while offering tenancy agreements, legal advice, and credit checks courtesy of a deal with Experian. The first 100 landlords to sign up are being offered free advertising.

Andrew Miller, CFO of Guardian Media Group and previously CFO of Trader Media Group (publisher of classifieds title Auto Trader) takes over as CEO at the Guardian Media Group. He replaces Carolyn McCall who leaves to become chief executive of budget airline easyJet.

Miller was key in the sale of 49.9 percent of Trader Media Group to Apax with which GMG now runs the classifieds arm as a joint company.

Amelia Fawcett, chair of GMG said of Miller that he “knows how to drive successful digital transformation and has led large-scale financial transactions.”

Figures from the Advertising Association of the U.K. suggest that the regional press websites saw an adspend increase of 19.7 percent for online recruitment and in the process gained ground against purely online competitors.

Q1 of 2010 saw the regional press secure 29 percent of online recruitment ads compared to 25 percent last year. According to the AA the online pure players saw their (considerable) lead shrink from 65 percent of market share to 62 percent over the same time.

Fresh from launching a pay-per-click advertising campaign to drum up visitors TheItJobBoard.co.uk is now announcing an affiliate program in partnership with the Affiliate Window network.

Jamie Bowler, the site’s head of marketing explains that; “We recognized that one of the fastest and most effective ways to increase our distribution was via an affiliate channel,” adding that “the cost-per-application model will work well for our business and help to drive an incremental increase in applications.”

U.K. FSBO TheLittleHouseCompany.co.uk has announced a cash-back deal for members at more than 2,000 retailers.

“The main incentive is that we reward in cash not complicated points systems,” explains TheLittleHouseCompany.co.uk’s director Nick Marr.

TheLittleHouseCompany.co.uk claims it is seen by 3 million housebuyers a month.

Multiple poster Idibu is opening up its service with an Application Programming Interface (API) that means third party job boards can set up an account and activate it themselves to have Idibu clients post directly to their site.

“Our partners are now able to create ready-to-use Idibu.com accounts in less than a minute – all their client has to do is login and click ‘Post a Job’,” according to Idibu.com MD Steve Walker. “We’re keen to help partners get more traffic through to their job board networks, and believe this API can help to achieve that.”

Hitwise figures show traffic to U.K. classifieds sites increased by 15 percent over the last 12 months, which Hitwise analysts suggest is due to consumers responding to the economic downturn by selling off second-hand goods.

Online classifieds in the U.K. were not doing quite as well as in the U.S., where classified sites have seen traffic rise up to 84 percent. But U.K. sites such as Gumtree had seen a 15 percent growth in traffic over the last year, according to Hitwise.  Hitwise ascribed the difference between U.S. and U.K. figures as being due to a weaker sense of brand. “Craigslist is much bigger in the U.S. than over here and Gumtree doesn’t have the same range,” Hitwise said.

Classified ads held a 0.29 percent market share of U.K. traffic with Gumtree.com, VivaStreet.uk and Preloved taking the top-three spots.

Osler’s Node, an online marketplace for doctors and medical students, has just launched in the U.K. The site is a classified portal for everything from scalpels to software, student accommodation to salary comparison and features a medical-recruitment service among its offerings.

The site borrows its name from red lesions found on fingers (typing too much?) but it’s an appropriate choice since it was Sir William Osler who famously believed that “If you listen carefully to the patient they will tell you the diagnosis.”

The site aims to build on a similar sense of sharing, using community to build the portal for doctors and by doctors.  Unusually it was founded not by a pharmaceutical company but by a young doctor  named Jamie Wilson: www.oslersnode.co.uk.

The REA Group will close its U.K. print operations at the end of this month.

Propertyfinder Publications will cease publishing its three titles, Hot Property, Renting and London Property News. All were aimed at the London market.

Propertyfinder Publications is jointly owned by the REA Group and News International Ltd.

The REA Group owns three websites in the U.K. – PropertyFinder.com, HotProperty.co.uk and UKPropertyShop.co.uk.

A KPMG survey in the U.K. shows that 40 percent of consumers said they would watch advertising on their mobile phones in exchange for free music. Twenty-eight percent said they would exchange advertising in return for free instant messaging.

The survey also showed that around 60 percent of people polled would accept advertising being served to them on the Internet in return for free content. Only 16 percent said they would be happy to reverse that formula and pay for the content rather than have to watch ads.

All of which bodes well for advertising, but perhaps less so for the micropayment and subscription models currently being discussed by content providers.

Q408 was “an all-time low” for business confidence in the U.K. advertising market according to the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) latest Bellwether poll. That’s an opinion shared by ZenithOptimedia’s latest reading of the runes which goes further to predict that media spend in 2009 will shrink by 6.9 percent globally and 8.7 percent in the U.K.

But before tolling the bells of doom and gloom there are some interesting points in both bodies’ findings. ZenithOptimedia expects no overall growth in U.K. advertising until recovery in 2010, a view shared by the IPA, but it does anticipate Internet ad spend to rise globally by 8.6 percent.

At the same time, the IPA’s Bellwether survey finds the rate at which ad spend has been drying up has slowed in Q109 while business confidence has picked up from the all-time low of Q4, with the percentage of companies believing their prospects have improved rising from 5 percent to 14 percent. Whisper it but there’s talk of being in sight of the bottom; or as Moray MacLennan, IPA president puts it; “This data supports the view that the bottom of the market has been reached. It will be a long road to full recovery, but this maybe the turning point. It’s good to see a graph going in the right direction for a change.”

For those in our line of business it’s also worth noting that in line with ZenithOptimedia’s predictions the Internet is the medium most likely to benefit. Online ad spending also suffered a record drop, but less so than the rest of the market and in the U.K. the IPA now indicates that it is enjoying a gain in market share of just under 10 percent.

You can ask Jeeves again. In the U.K. at least.

Ask.com has brought back its iconic know-it-all butler as it struggles to make inroads against Google’s search dominance. Jeeves was the face of Ask’s search engine until 2006 when the service was overhauled. But it still didn’t take off. In the U.K., for example, its in fourth place behind Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, the latter of which dominates 87.3 percent of the market, according to recent Hitwise figures.

The company says the Jeeves character is back “by popular demand” and will be receiving a 3D facelift.

Ask is jumping on the social media bandwagon and is launching a campaign that will have Jeeves posting a “question of the day.” There will also be Jeeves on TV.

Jeeves hasn’t shown up outside England. In the U.S., it’s still plain Ask.com.