Friday, July 13, 2001

Big Online Job Service Acquires Web Site on College Admissions and Scholarships By SCOTT CARLSON TMP Worldwide, the company that owns the job-ads Web site Monster.com, announced Thursday that it had acquired FastWeb, a site that helps high-school students search for colleges and scholarships. The deal is yet another recent foray by Monster.com into higher education. FastWeb is the second college-oriented Web site that TMP Worldwide has acquired. Late last month, the company announced the acquisition of CollegeLink.com, a site that offers advice about the college-application process. Late last year, Monster bought Jobtrak, an employment Web site that focuses on the college-student market. And Kevin Mullins, a spokesman for Monster.com, said that next month the company would announce plans to begin marketing career-oriented courses on its Web site. Mr. Mullins would not provide details on the program. Mr. Mullins said those steps were all part of Monster's "intern-to-C.E.O. strategy" -- a plan to build brand loyalty among users as they begin their college years. Mr. Mullins would not say if Monster planned to operate FastWeb and CollegeLink independently, or if it planned to incorporate the sites' content into Monster.com. Monster's management "has always been ambitious and has never wanted to be in just one market," said Matthew A. Litfin, an analyst who follows TMP Worldwide for William Blair & Company, in Chicago. "One of the areas that they believe that could be more than just tangential to job seeking is learning." Mr. Litfin said that for dot-com investments in a bubble-busted economy, both FastWeb and CollegeLink are "new and small, but definitely strong in their areas." FastWeb's site says it can link students to more than 4,000 colleges and 600,000 scholarships in its database. Students can search the database free, but FastWeb provides their personal information to "marketing partners," according to the site. Of Monster's strategy to attract college-bound students, Mr. Litfin added: "If they can get someone hooked into Monster at the stage when they're an intern, then as they grow through their career, they will use Monster as they progress. But I would argue that the success of that strategy is yet to be written." Monster.com had revenues of $350-million in 2000. Mr. Mullins said the company had been profitable for 12 consecutive quarters. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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