Thu, 14 Jun 2012

Australian jobs board SEEK is the sole bidder for ownership of the top-level domain (TLD) .seek, while jobsite Monster is believed to be one of the applicants for .monster.

These are some of the job site and recruitment highlights from the list of bidders for new internet address endings, published yesterday [13 June] by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann).

Guardian News and Media, which operates jobs.guardian.co.uk, is the sole bidder for .guardianmedia, .observer and .theguardian. However, for .gdn it faces a rival bid from Russian firm Joint Stock Company Navigation-Information Systems and is bidding for .guardian alongside The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America.

The company says it is too early to say whether or not it will use the domain names for its job site, but is “considering all of our options”, and also comments that the bidding “falls squarely within Guardian News & Media’s transformation into a digital-first organisation”.

Monster was unable to confirm or deny that it was one of the two companies bidding for .monster. The two bidders are recorded as ‘Monster Worldwide, Inc.’ and ‘Monster, Inc.’ The former company was also the only bidder for .beknown, which implies it is indeed the job site, as this is the name of its professional networking app on Facebook.
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In total there were 1,930 new TLDs, of which 166 were in non-Roman alphabets.

The most coveted domain is .app, with 13 applications. Elsewhere, Google bid for .google and .youtube alongside less obvious choices such as .and, .boo, .dad and .new.

Bidding companies had to pay registration and application fees totaling $185k (£119k), and winners will pay at least $25k a year once their domain is in use.

Jobs.guardian.co.uk is the UK’s 12th most popular employment and training site, according to Experian Hitwise, with 1.22% share of visits.

The most popular is LinkedIn, with 19.05%. The only site in the top 20 to use the .jobs domain is sainsburys.jobs, although it is owned by Employ Media.