The owner of the Daily Mail today spent €30 million (£24.7 million) on Italian jobs website Jobrapido in a significant move to expand its online advertising business overseas.
Jobrapido, which was founded in 2006, claims to be the world’s second-largest international job-search engine with 32 million monthly visitors in 50 countries.
Profits were about £5 million last year on sales of £20 million.
Daily Mail and General Trust hailed the acquisition, saying it “gives us access to job-seeking candidates on a global scale and supercharges the transformation of our business model”.
It is just the latest acquisition by DMGT’s newspaper arm A&N Media as it looks to bolster its position in the digital market for small ads in the job, property and car sectors.
Small ads — known as classifieds — were once so lucrative for print newspapers that they were dubbed “rivers of gold” but demand has shifted dramatically from print to the web in the last decade. DMGT, a 24.9% shareholder in the Evening Standard, said it will combine Jobrapido with other sites that it already owns, including Jobsite, Oilcareers and Broadbean, to form a new subsidiary called Evenbase.
Around two-thirds of profits at DMGT come from business-to-business operations rather than consumer-facing newspapers.
