Job Boards - 11 hours In
Thank you to everyone who has sent in feedback, questions and ideas for the ProBlogger Job Boards as well as the many bloggers who have linked up to it. — I've always wanted to be a match maker - and now I sort of feel like I am with lots of reports of bloggers …
Context & Ripple Effects
Darren Rowse's ProBlogger has been building toward this: the site's whole business is teaching bloggers to earn, and the Job Boards extend that into placement itself. The timing lands a month after Jobster raised fresh capital to push social job search, so money and attention are converging on hiring that runs through communities rather than classified giants.
The first eleven hours matter mostly as signal: bloggers sent feedback and linked to the boards voluntarily, which suggests demand-side pull from employers hunting writing talent and supply-side pull from readers who trust the host's curation. That dual pull is what turns a sidebar widget into a revenue line.
First-order effects
- Bloggers gain a curated channel to paid gigs inside a publication they already read, while ProBlogger adds a listing-fee revenue stream on top of ads and affiliate income.
- Employers looking for writers get access to a self-selected pool of proven bloggers without paying big-board rates.
Second-order effects
- Other blog networks and niche publishers face pressure to bolt job boards onto their own audiences before ProBlogger becomes the default place to hire web writers.
- General-purpose job boards lose a slice of their entry-level and freelance listings traffic to hosts who can vouch for candidates by their published work.
Third-order effects
- If niche-audience boards keep working, classifieds revenue fragments away from national boards toward thousands of small publishers who own the trust relationship — the same thesis investors backed in Jobster's social-search round.
The trend: Niche publishers are converting reader trust into classifieds revenue, pulling hiring off centralized job boards and into community-run marketplaces.