Career Builder, Monster Demolition? (MNST)

One of the fascinating aspects of Google's contextual ad service from a Web publisher's perspective is seeing which ads come up on your pages. Google recently began to place CPM-based ads (where the publisher gets paid for page views rather than clicks), and the result has been a plethora of new ads. One interesting take-away for 'Net stocks:

The Internet Stock Blog and other financial sites I use have become plastered with orange and blue graphical ads for CareerBuilder.com. This looks like a large and sustained ad campaign, and if you click through to CareerBuilder's web site you'll see that it's impressive. Career Builder is owned by three newspaper companies: Gannet, Knight-Ridder and Tribune.

The primary competitor? Monster Worldwide (ticker: MNST).

Two possible stock take-aways:

1. The job market is heating up, justifying increased ad spending across the industry. That would be good news for MNST, which has the leading position.
2. MNST's competitors are starting to spend heavily to take market share. That would be incrementally negative for MNST.

Thoughts? You can leave comments below. But only if you're reading this on the web site (not via RSS), in which case you'll have seen those gaudy ads...

One final comment. This issue illustates how fundamentally transparent the Internet is, with important ramifications for investors. We're now in a world where analysts can track the number of eBay auction listings, the size and value of ad campaigns, and the price per click of search ads.

MNST chart below.