Bloggers get jobs...

So GigaOm has launched a job board a few weeks after TechCrunch did the same.

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch held out an olive branch to Om to start up a separate company for job postings which Om declined.

Om’s a smart guy and to be honest, I like his blog more than TechCrunch (matter of what I find interesting) and I’m sure he has his reasons for passing on Arrington, but I can’t figure out what they are.

Job listings are a commodity product, you can get them anywhere and it doesn’t really matter where you get them. And with RSS readers, for the most part you may set up your search once and then you’ll have no idea where you got them from. They’ll just show up in your reader.

So why is Om attempting to make a big splash in a commodity market? He set his price at $200/pop, which is the same as CrunchBoard. This is smart because the last thing either probably wants is a price war. However, I’m sure some other blogger is going to come in with a cheaper job board and there goes the market. No barrier to entry, no differentiation of value.

I see the blogger job board market last a short while and then melt away like Icarus’ wings. It takes one blogger with an RSS and $50 postings and the whole market will plummet to Earth.

Sure, both Om and Arrington could argue they get higher traffic numbers, but who cares? I’m a MyYahoo junkie. All I need to do is set it up once and then I’ll never know/care how much traffic the original site gets.

In fact, you could imagine a Craigslist type place with a solid RSS feed, no content to get in the way and super-cheap price for companies and there you go.

Or, you could imagine that either Om or Arrington see a slow down in their $200/job post model, and dip their toes in the $150 pool. Then it is just a race to the bottom.

I’m not trying to be a bag of downers… I really hope both Om and Arrington succeed and that they can finally create some sort of repeatable blogger business model. I just don’t really see how offering competing job post boards will do it.