Using the website traffic statistics comparator Similarweb.com, we have prepared an overview of the traffic on Jobs.cz compared to two long-established Czech job portals (Jobdnes.cz, Volnamista.cz) and two newcomers to the Czech online labour market (Airjobs.cz, Chcipraci.cz).
Similarweb.com was used for our purposes since most job portals do not publish publicly verifiable results of their traffic. The Similarweb's metric is not absolutely accurate; however, based on a comparison we made with publicly audited results of the Czech online audience research project NetMonitor, the numbers have a real predictive value. The following data from Similarweb.com show the total number of visits to individual portals per month. Numbers of real users per month are given below under the abbreviation RU.
Old and new players vs. Jobs.cz
Interestingly, Airjobs.cz, which entered the market in 2015 with the ambition of becoming a "Czech LinkedIn", wins proportionally to its total traffic over Jobs.cz in the percent of visits from search engines and social networks. However, the portal recorded only one hundredth of the monthly traffic of Jobs.cz over the last six months (31,000 visits per month compared to 3.3 million visits to Jobs.cz).
The only similar thing to LinkedIn that Airjobs.cz managed to achieve in 2015 was a negative economic result. Both Airjobs and LinkedIn ended deep in red numbers. Specifically, Personal One, the company operating Airjobs.cz, showed an operating loss of nearly CZK 30 million in 2015.
Chcipraci.cz, a job portal which entered the market with great fanfare in late 2015 as a "confident challenger to the current dominant players" and "the biggest and friendliest job portal in the Czech Republic", currently offers more than 110,000 vacancies. Over the past six months, however, it has enjoyed only 37,000 visits per month.
Moreover, Chcipraci.cz has been criticised for publishing job offers from other portals. This is a similar system of taking jobs from public sources which is used by the international job search engine Careerjet, currently offering up to 300,000 vacancies in the Czech Republic. These numbers can't be considered real since they contain a number of already invalid positions and duplications arising from the very philosophy of taking over positions from many sources.
Portals with more than a ten-year history have a significantly higher traffic - Dobraprace.cz operated by INET-SERVIS.CZ (232,000 visits per month); Jobdnes.cz owned by the Mafra media group (226,000 visits per month, 90,000 RU per month); Volnamista.cz operated by Seznam.cz (900,000 visits per month). The traffic of Volnamista.cz is an excellent result if we consider what this portal offers in comparison with other portals: it shows a significantly outdated design, reminiscent of newspaper cuttings, and a lack of common tools for recruiters and offers of free advertising. The connection with Seznam.cz - the most widely used Czech internet search engine - helps Volnamista.cz considerably.
Objectively speaking, the dominant position of the LMC portals is justified. Even if they have the highest costs of advertising, often twice or more times higher than the prices of the competition, they exceed their competitors in the field of traffic frequently more than a hundredfold.
Job portals in the Czech Republic
In alphabetical order
CZK - Czech crown (koruna)
1 € ≈ 27 CZK, 1 $ ≈ 24 CZK
| Website | Owner | Price of job ads in CZK (2016) | Annual turnover (2015) | Year of foundation | Monthly visits / RU - real users |
| Airjobs.cz | Personal ONE s.r.o. (a Company owned by EMTC - Czech as) | 1 ad: CZK 3,300 / month | CZK 8,000,000 (Personal ONE s.r.o) | 2015 | 31,000 visits (about 10,000 RU) |
| Cesky-trh-prace.cz (A network of regional job portals) | Český Trh Práce s.r.o. | 1 ad: CZK 1,700 / month | CZK 2,700,000 | 2004 | About 60,000 visits to 15 portals (about 20,000 RU) The largest regional portal pracevpraze.cz - about 10,000 visits / 3,000 RU) |
| Cocuma.cz | Company Culture Market s.r.o. | development and maintenance of a company profile from CZK 40 000 / year | 2015 financial statements not yet published | 2015 | 25,000 visits (about 8,000 RU) |
| Dobraprace.cz | INET-SERVIS.CZ | From CZK 700 / 20 days | CZK 4,500,000 (Entire company INET-SERVIS.CZ) | 2003 | 232,000 visits (77,000 RU - NetMonitor 8/2016) |
| Hyperprace.cz | HyperMedia, a.s. | Prices not publicly available | 2015 financial statements not published yet | 2008 | 30,000 visits (18,000 RU - NetMonitor 8/2016 |
| Chcipraci.cz | Web Solutions LLC, based in the US, advertising managed by Advertising ONE, a.s. | 1 adt: CZK 3,490 / 350 views | Advertising ONE 2015 financial statements not published yet | 2015 | 37,000 visits (about 12,000 RU) |
| Jobdnes.cz | Mafra as (owned by the AGROFERT company whose sole shareholder is Andrej Babis) | 1 ad: CZK 2,000 / month | Mafra does not publish financial results of this sub-project (turnover of up to tens of millions Czech crowns can be expected) | 2004 | 226,000 visits (90,000 RU - NetMonitor 8/2016) |
| Jobote.cz | LMC s.r.o (Alma Media) | Subscription package: CZK 25.000 to 85,000 / year | CZK 612,200,000 (Entire LMC) | 2013 | 13,000 visits (about 5,000 RU) |
| Jobs.cz | LMC s.r.o (Alma Media) | 1 ad: CZK 7,900 / month 3 ads: CZK 19,900 / month | CZK 612,200,000 (Entire LMC) | 1996 | 3,300,000 million visits (about 1,000,000 RU) |
| Monster.cz | LMC s.r.o (Alma Media) | 1 ad: CZK 3,350 / month | CZK 612,200,000 (Entire LMC) | 1999 | 150,000 visits (about 50,000 RU) |
| Prace.cz | LMC s.r.o (Alma Media) | 1 ad: CZK 4,235 / month | CZK 612,200,000 (Entire LMC) | 1997 | 1,600,000 visits (about 500,000 RU) |
| Profesia.cz | LMC s.r.o (Alma Media) | 1 ad: CZK 1,800 / month | CZK 612,200,000 (Entire LMC) | 2004 | 570,000 visits (about 190,000 RU) |
| Proudly.cz | UNIjobs.cz s.r.o. | Prices not publicly available | 2015 financial statements not published yet | 2015 | 62,000 visits (about 21,000 RU) |
| Volnamista.cz (Formerly SPRAC) | Seznam.cz, as | The basic form of advertising for free | Seznam.cz does not specify the results of this subproject. | 1997 | 907,000 visits (225,000 RU - NetMonitor 8/2016) |
Source: Justice.cz (financial statements), Similarweb.com (visits), NetMonitor 8/2016 (RU), price lists of individual job portals
Trying to push LMC out of its position as the leading player on the online labour market in the Czech Republic has remained a utopian dream of many founders and marketers of new job portals for more than twenty years. These players did not adequately understand the basic rule of the Internet: the leader in a segment takes (almost) all.
Other entities playing at high traffic numbers can't actually impress recruiters who have become accustomed to the fact that passive candidates have to be looked for elsewhere and everything else is solved by LMC. As Jára Cimrman, the fictional Czech genius, said: "We may dispute the fact, we may even disagree, but there is nothing else that can be done about it."
Financial indicators only confirm this assumption and it does not seem that anything is likely to change in the future.
-kk-