Seek released its half-year results and saw paid ads on the platform drop by 20% over the last 6 months.
👉 Background: Seek is the online job marketplace for whenever you're looking for a new job, or to try and snoop on the likely salary of your CEO (it's $300,000 by the way). While Seek was founded in Australia, it also has job marketplaces in Hong Kong, South East Asia, Brazil, and Mexico.
👉 What happened: Now, Seek just released its half year results and its Australian business was its biggest worry. It saw paid ads on the platform drop by 20% over the last 6 months. And as a result, its overall revenue was down 5% compared to the same time period last year.
👉 What else: While its revenue jumped 2% in South East Asia, it wasn’t enough to offset the weakness in job ads in the Australian market.
💡When economies sneeze, employment marketplaces and online job boardscatch a cold. In Australia, we’ve seen the unemployment rate increase steadily from 3.5% in February 2023 to over 3.8% in December 2023.
💡When the economy goes through contractions, companies tend to reduce hiring or freeze recruitment altogether. The flow-on effect is that it leads to a decrease in job ads and revenues for platforms like Seek.
💡So despite doing "more with less", the macro economy is pulling Seek share's price down with it.
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