According to Techcrunch, Google is now in talks to acquire SimplyHired.com, a job listing website that works by searching across many websites such as Craigslist and Wetfeet.com and aggregating all the results. Venturebeat also has a first-hand account of the breaking news.
According to these articles, SimplyHired recently raised $13.5M for a $40M post investment valuation from NewsCorp. I find this amazing because it seems the barriers to entry for an aggregating website are so low’ the business model to me seems too simple. What if in a year a new security device comes out capable of blocking these aggregating/scraping sites from accessing their content?
Are sites like Craigslist.com really okay with their content being exploited on other sites? True, SimplyHired does ultimately send the person back to Craigslist.com but still, when your entire business model relies on someone else’s content it seems like a recipe for disaster…at least to me.
Thoughts?
