Maybe the third time’s a charm.
If you’ve been in the industry for less than a decade, the name Jobster probably means nothing to you. If you’re an old guy like me, however, you remember a time when Jobster was the hottest startup recruiting had seen since Monster.
With a charismatic and abrasive founder, $50 million in funding, and a hipster-before-it-was-hip Seattle address, everyone was talking. Unfortunately, not many were buying though, and the company sold off to a relatively unknown company called Zapoint back in 2010. Some sweet search rankings and Indeed backfill click-dollars lasted for awhile, but the company changed course, rebranding as Tambora in 2016.
The new direction must’ve made the brand Jobster collateral damage, because a company called JobBird purchased the domain name for $200,000 in October, according to DNJournal.com. Popular domain auction site Sedo coordinated the sale.
JobBird who?
I said the same thing. The company is in the Netherlands, and at one point was doing quite well, apparently. As early as March 2018, the company had plans to expand elsewhere in Europe, then hitting the U.S. and Asia. Things haven’t quite worked out, however, as the company declared bankruptcy in December 2018.
Confusing, right? It gets more interesting. On December 19, 2018 JobBird was taken over by Young Capital. AIM Group’s Anastasia Gnezditskaia reports, “Young Capital has been searching for a jobs site to invest in for a while. It’s not yet clear whether JobBird’s 12 employees will stay or be partially let go.”
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It also operates a few other job sites. Gnezditskaia says JobBird is a well-known brand in the Netherlands and isn’t likely to disappear. So where does Jobster come in?
On January 3, going to www.jobster.com unveiled the following message: “Jobster.com. Soon to be unleashed again, The jobster.com team.” As of this writing, however, the URL redirects users to JobBird, a bankrupt, recently taken-over company.
Stay tuned for where this thing is going. Maybe Jobster will be the company’s foray into America, where the brand still has some awareness. It’s hard to believe anyone would drop $200,000 for a redirect, so bigger things must be in store, right?
For the new owner’s sake, I hope they have better luck than the previous two domain holders.
Hi Joel, let me shed some light on this for you. The owners of YoungCapital were already in the market for a generic jobboard for a while. It was them who purchased the Jobster.com domain name in October 2018 – most likely they had plans to launch with that name. Not long after, Jobbird.com declared bankrupcy (the company always pretended to be doing very well, but in hindsight never reached profitability) and YoungCapital struck a deal with the curator to purchase the Jobbird.com assets (for less than $300,000 from what I read elsewhere). Since Jobbird most likely is the generic (and well known, in the Netherlands) jobboard brand YoungCapital was looking for all along I don’t expect they will be doing anything with the Jobster.com domain name for now.
I wrote a bit more on the Jobster.com domain name acquisition here: https://dngeek.com/2018/10/brandable-domain-name-sales-week-42-jobster-com-calibra-com-revlabs-com/