Monster Worldwide has bought HotJobs from Yahoo for $225 million. It will also be in charge of Yahoo’s recruitment content in North America for the next three years, bringing in perhaps another $100 million for the life of the deal from home page traffic, etc. As part of the deal, which closes in 3Q 2010, Monster also gets exclusive rights to negotiate similar arrangements with Yahoo’s overseas properties.

HotJobs has been on the market since Carol Bartz took over as CEO of Yahoo early last year (or even before). It hasn’t been clear if anyone would buy it for more than a fire-sale price. The deal’s price of $225 million does represent a significant discount from the $439 million that Yahoo paid in 2002, but it is more than some handicappers had been predicting.

The deal likely propels Monster well past Gannett’s CareerBuilder as the online recruitment leaders (by revenues). Lately, CareerBuilder’s lagging profits have become a drain on Gannett’s profits. Likewise, Monster today reported that 4Q revs were down 27 percent, and that it suffered a net loss of $2.1 million on 4Q revenues of $213 million.

For Yahoo, the deal is the latest in a series of selloffs. Notably, it sold its search business to Microsoft last year, has de-emphasized other areas such as shopping and small business, and has been rumored to put some of its other verticals in play as well.

HotJobs, of course, had been the original glue that brought Yahoo and the newspapers together. But the consortium has lately been focused more on using Yahoo’s APT behavioral targeting advertising platform. Some members of the consortium already use Monster.

Recruitment remains a huge category, but in recent years, has been challenged by the recession. It has also become a major battle zone driven by technologies, such as semantic search-and-match job listings, mapping and communities of interest. Indeed, a growing part of the market has moved to niche specialties, such as trade associations, etc. At the same time, ancillary verticals such as vocational education, relocation and job fairs have proved to be less important than once thought.

Allmenus.com, the online ordering portal with 255,000 restaurant menus around the country and 3,500 online ordering relationships, will focus on specific local markets via a new partnership program that gives a portion of revenues to newspapers or other local promotional partners.

The Pittsburgh Post Gazette is live, and other newspapers and local media companies are anticipated as partners in coming months. Allmenus.com is the second brand from parent company Dotmenu.com. The original brand was Campusfood.com, which brings online ordering to college students.

Allmenus’ media partnerships involve co-branding and promotional advertising, potentially including display, direct, e-mail and social media. They also involve contextual integrated content. While they notably don’t involve the papers in sales, the papers receive a minority share of local market revenues. Revenues are derived from online food ordering, advertising and monthly maintenance fees.

Allmenus Chief Revenue Officer Tony Wills, a former exec with Quigo, Newsday and R.H. Donnelley, says the company determined that local markets had to be launched one at a time to be truly successful — even though it has good distribution via Google and Yahoo Local. Newspapers still have the online brand and promotional power to best drive local awareness and sales, he says, despite their drop-offs in penetration and usage. Newspapers also appreciate Allmenus as a “content” service since it strives to have the most comprehensive set of menus in each market — something it handles with local feet on the street, and fly-in teams.

Under terms of the partnerships, Allmenus widgets for online ordering will be featured in specific contextual parts of newspaper sites, including sports, local, weather and business. While it would seem to make sense to have newspapers also handle local sales, Wills says that it wouldn’t really work because newspaper sales staffs are paid on commissions.

A primary reason it wouldn’t work is that Allmenus takes no money upfront. Instead, it charges a transaction fee that is a little over 10 percent.  It takes 11.5 percent, or $5.75, out of a $50 order, for instance. “If there is no revenue, there is no sale,” says Wills.

In any case, newspapers may have trouble committing the resources in today’s environment. “Newspapers are under siege,” says Wills. “They can’t commit the resources. They need it to be turn-key.”

There is a role for newspaper sales reps, however — to build awareness for the Allmenus service. “It makes the print sale” for restaurants more valuable because of added awareness and usage, says Wills. Indeed, online ordering is a big piece of the restaurant landscape. Pizza Hut is getting 30 percent of its sales online. Moreover, online boosts the amount of sales — online orders are 10 percent higher than in-person orders because it is so easy to check off additional or more expensive items. Ultimately, however, it is a different ballgame than brand and awareness advertising.

Under the new leadership of CEO Carol Bartz, everything is up for review at Yahoo, and that probably includes HotJobs, its recruitment site. But recent press reports suggesting that HotJobs has already been designated for sale are off base.

The news stories are based on Bartz’s broad answer to a question about which Yahoo properties might be vulnerable. HotJobs has never been singled out.

The future of HotJobs is an especially important issue to many members of the 800-newspaper strong Yahoo consortium, which was initially put together to co-promote HotJobs as a national recruitment solution. HotJobs remains an important part of the consortium’s efforts, although some members of the consortium use other recruitment  solutions, such as Monster.com. There has been a lot of focus on behavioral targeting (SmartAds), as well as conversion and take rates.

Bartz herself has already made several gestures in support of the consortium. Last month, she appeared at the consortium’s affiliate meeting in Las Vegas.

Next week is the Newspaper Association of America’s Annual Convention in San Diego. I’ll cover Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote on Tuesday, in which he’ll express his support of the newspaper industry despite Google’s very public axing in January of its Print Ads newspaper partnership (the talk is being streamed live at 10 a.m. PDT).

Newspapers, of course, aren’t in very good shape right now. Long term, their traditional model may not be sustainable. But if you are trying to reach the local audience, they deliver an effective yield, with local readership of maybe 25 percent to 30 percent. You can’t match it.

Yahoo is relying on its ambitious newspaper consortium to help in a number of ways. Among other things, its newspaper ties supports HotJobs, provides inventory for national advertising and sells behavioral targeting.

Zillow is another partner that is banking (somewhat) on its ties with newspapers.The Zestimates company expects a healthy bump from this week’s launch of a real estate search partnership with 180 newspapers, including The Tampa Tribune and 100 small weeklies owned by Community Newspaper Holdings Inc. among its first rollouts.

In coming months, additional papers will launch, including the Richmond Times-Dispatch and the Winston-Salem Journal. Besides search, Zillow is providing real estate advice features and mortgage information and calculators.

CFO Spencer Rascoff says he especially likes the strong newspaper brand. The Tampa Tribune has “close to 100 percent brand ID in its locality” he says — something that a new brand like Zillow wouldn’t have on its own.

Going into the annual conference, I’m not very interested in hearing about the various life-support efforts that newspapers have had to undertake (but there will be a lot of that). In my backyard, the L.A. Times has shown the way by ending the poly-bagging of the morning newspaper so that my sprinklers destroy the paper, wrapping each section with an overlapping ad that needs to be peeled off before I can read it, enclosing AARP membership materials since I am probably ready for it (not) and making me specifically ask for credit when I suspend the paper for vacation holds.

In my hometown of San Diego, I find it especially depressing that the local paper (which has just been sold to an equity firm at a fire sale price) is perhaps most identified with the homeless men selling it at red lights.

But I’m always very interested in hearing about what newspapers can do as a powerhouse local brand with daily frequency that delivers to a large percentage of the community in print, online and now on mobile. The footprint won’t be as large, the news coverage won’t be as extensive, and substitutes may develop equal effectiveness. But the opportunities beckon.

In fact, as we see at conference after conference, newspapers have more experiments going on in local community, information and commerce than any other sector in our interactive local media space. It isn’t entirely because of any special nostalgia that I keep an eye on this industry.

AOL Yellow Pages has greatly benefited from search engine optimization, with 50 percent of its traffic coming from SEO, according to Chris Spanos, GM, local search, who was speaking today at Kelsey’s Marketplaces conference in Los Angeles. “We have a very healthy Yellow Pages business,” said Spanos, who called it “the No. 1 independent Yellow Pages” site. “If the AOL network were to go away, the business would still be strong because of what we’re getting from Google and MSN.”

Spanos also noted that AOL was effectively using search (and AOL.com) to drive traffic into its numerous vertical sites. AOL autos and AOL real estate are leaders in their space, he said. These “help uses make the right decisions,” he noted. “We monetize that in a strong way.”

Yahoo Local lead Atif Rafiq, speaking on the same session, made similar points about Yahoo’s efforts in verticals and search. “There is a deep integration of local into [user] experiences,” he noted. Rafiq also said Yahoo is looking beyond basic “transactional type things” in local verticals. “The next step up is research … which [requires] more sophisticated behavior.”

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Yahoo has announced the addition of The Boston Globe and St. Petersburg Times to its Newspaper Consortium, which now has 37 media companies with 796 newspapers. The announcement was timed for The Newspaper Association of America’s  MediaXChange meeting this week in Las Vegas, where Yahoo holds a bi-annual summit.

The consortium was initially envisioned as a “one size fits all” platform when it launched in November 2006. But newspapers had conflicting issues in terms of existing contracts, commitment etc. Consequently, many newspapers are participating on a pick n’ choose basis.

Currently, 120 newspapers participate with the Apt ad management behavioral targeting program (100 of which are “live”). There are also 300 newspapers participating in the “referral” program, in which Yahoo sends users to newspaper sites for specific content; and 600 newspapers participating with Yahoo’s HotJobs recruitment site.

The Yahoo Newspaper Consortium is seeing new ad dollars coming in, primarily for its behavioral targeted campaigns, which account for 90 percent of its business, per Yahoo VP Lem Lloyd. Lloyd oversees the program for Exec VP Hilary Schneider. (Both were featured this weekend in a glowing report in The New York Times, complete with picture.)

Lloyd says that newspapers selling Yahoo solutions are seeing a “share shift. They’re taking money from broadcast and outdoor [advertising]. Lots of local advertisers are opening up traditional ad spending budgets” and seeking alternatives.

Local advertisers have typically bought certain GRPs (gross rating points) on TV, or outdoor. But with sales down and costs up, “they’re rethinking that,” says Lloyd. “They’re open to a story that combines the local newspaper and Yahoo together.” The consortium offer can “match the audience reach of broadcasters, coupled with the premium targeting that behavioral campaigns offer.” All for a significant discount.

At this point, most of Lloyd’s assessment is anecdotal and hasn’t been internally quantified. But the word on the street is highly positive — at least, on Yahoo’s street. “Advertisers would be predisposed to say it isn’t working, to get a better deal,” says Lloyd. “But they say: ‘Hey, we sold a lot more cars.’ ”

He sees more evidence via the high clickthrough rates. Generally speaking, the average clickthrough rate is 0.34. But we’re seeing “multiples” of that.

At the newspaper level, of course, the tallies can definitely be quantified. Among the 50 newspapers that are actively selling the program, “more than 10 newspapers have sold more than $1 million. Several sold more than $2 million.” Interestingly, Lloyd says the size of the newspaper is not necessarily an indicator as to how well the campaign will do.

“We saw a 69,000 circulation paper get $1.8 million in one week,” says Lloyd. “Another paper with a circulation of 33,000 got $350,000. It is more about sales leadership.”

The New York Times photo of Lloyd with Exec VP Hilary Schneider

Scott Moore, who is back at Microsoft as GM and executive producer of the U.S. content business after four years at Yahoo, told paidContent he had been hoping to launch an ad-supported local news/info service. Apparently, Microsoft seemed like a safer bet.

Our Marketplaces 2009 conference in L.A. is just around the corner (March 16-18). Some great additions have just been announced: Active Network CEO Dave Alberga (our fourth keynote); Yahoo Local leader Atif Rafiq; and all the ins and outs of vertical local mobile services in a Day 3 SuperForum.

The SuperForum has a lot of highlights in and of itself, including Dinesh Moorjani, who runs mobile for IAC; Sharon Knitter, Cars.com; Walt Doyle, Where.com; Tom Kenney, Verve Wireless; Scott Dunlap, NearbyNow; Craig Hagopian, V-Enable; Nick Gee, Mobile People; and Lee Gientke, Orange Soda.

We’re also working with BIA Digital Partners Principal Gregg Johnson on a very special pre-conference session that will spell out all the best strategies for financing interactive companies in this environment – timely, no? Gregg’s the best at that.

We usually see everyone who is serious about the local and vertical space at our events. Will we see you, too? Sign up here.

We’re out with our predictions for 2009. But what’s the final word for 2008? Truly, it was a very stimulating and thoughtful year for our local media and commerce industry. But speaking for myself, it’s hard to say whether it was a good year, especially with fresh layoffs that we are hearing about every day. In fact, the year was kind of Dickensian (“best of times, worst of times”).

On one hand, there has been an explosion in local content with YouTube, Twitter and StumbleUpon, and omnipresent local reviews with services such as Yelp and Angie’s List. Online video has become a real medium, aided by $100 video cameras and the emergence of HD standards, and mobile is starting to be a real channel, aided by GPS and iPhones.

On the small-business front, search has gained wider acceptance in key local segments and has become mainstreamed in many ways, adding a useful channel to the ad mix. And the percentage of SMBs with Web sites or personal profile pages has crept up to 61 percent.

But what about the business? For traditional media, it was especially bad. In 2008 we had a perfect storm. Massive debt and declining circulation hit the newspapers hard — and the Yellow Pages in the same way. Sharp hits to retail, auto and real estate advertising sealed the deal. The decline in auto has not only hit traditional media. Online ad networks that aggregate local media, such as Centro, relied on auto for 30 percent of their revenues.

The result: Tribune stands bankrupt, while McClatchy and Lee and others are near bankruptcy. It even appears possible that Idearc and R.H. Donnelley — the two public YP companies in the U.S. — could file for bankruptcy (although we are not betting on that).

At the same time, old-line products such as Valpak coupons have been put up for sale, and we don’t see clear replacements for them yet. Vertical products remain compelling, but with the economic slump haven’t proved to be the hedge for which traditional media have hoped (at this point).

Moreover, third-party auto sites such as Autobytel have been put on the sales block. And vertical stars such as Zillow have begun to lay off workers, even as they form broad sales arrangements.

Local-oriented start-ups also got hit. Credit has tightened up. The only companies that are likely to get funding are those that can get to cash flow positive with as little money as possible. Social-oriented services seem especially poised to get hurt.

So, we have to change the conventional wisdom. The old CW: “If we just tweak things, and gradually switch advertisers over, everything should work itself out.” In fact, with the emergence of new, highly targeted ad products, we could see advertisers spending much more on marketing than in the past.

The new CW? It isn’t so simple.

We’ve learned that hyperlocal doesn’t live in a vacuum, and that there isn’t ready demand for block-by-block coverage. But it is a useful add-on. Content platforms have become a commodity but can be improved with navigation, tagging and geotargeting.

We’ve also learned that mapping is a feature that can be greatly enhanced with personalization and advertising, and could be the basis for a new portal (but there are lots of new fronts for portals). And that mobile content shows real promise, but is still kept “closed” by the carriers, which manage 90 percent of it behind their firewalls (although Google’s Android might begin to open things up).

Classifieds have taken a huge hit by free providers such as Craigslist, which continues to gather steam. But it is encouraging to see classifieds get extended by aggregators such as Google Base, Vast and Oodle, which actually started working with MySpace, Facebook and Wal-Mart (a new local player?) — a truly interesting development.

On the “national-local” front, geotargeting has become so widespread that it actually has put a crimp into CPM rates for local publishers, which have come down from $10 to $6 or $7 in many cases. But we’re seeing organic adoption by regional advertisers such as supermarkets, banks, furniture store chains and lotteries. As Centro CEO Shawn Riegsecker has noted: “They’ve been spending 1 percent to 10 percent of their revenue on the Web, with no strategy.” In 2009 they’ll get one.

For “local-local,” the bottom line remains the engagement of the small business. It is greatly encouraging to see the wide adoption of free online tools by real estate agents, for instance, and ad building templates and planning by companies like AdReady, which has deals with companies such as The New York Times.

It is also encouraging to see the evolution of leads-based services, where ServiceMagic, for instance, has moved the continuum from simply providing leads to delivering jobs (i.e., installation of flat screen TVs bought at Target). Angie’s List’s “two-sided cash register” from premium subscriptions and advertising also represents a new model.

In the end, we are in an environment where we are absolutely climbing over bodies to get ahead. But the opportunities seem stronger than ever, as is the relevancy of the products to consumers. It is an important and meaningful thing for all of us to work on, isn’t it? Happy new year to all our friends, and thanks for your support. We’ll see you in 2009.