SimplyHired's Traffic Soars: But Is It Real?

For those of us who pay attention to these things, the recent rise in SimplyHired’s traffic on Compete and Alexa was noteworthy. Since April, both services show a dramatic rise in traffic – see chart to right, click for larger view). And more importantly, they show SimplyHired overtaking competitor Indeed, even though they have historically trailed them in reach and traffic.

There’s a problem though: Comscore shows no such increase in traffic – Indeed is still far ahead of Simply Hired in terms of unique visitors. The Comscore data is shown at the bottom of this post.

Here’s what the source of the discrepancy might be: We have heard that Simply Hired may have started buying a very large number of “pop-under” advertisements from WhenU. Comscore says that they filter this “push” traffic out of their stats. I suspect Alexa and Compete do not.

WhenU is regarded by many to be nothing more than malware, and users who’ve had it infect their machine spend a lot of time trying to get it removed. There are a number of forum threads where people try to help others remove it.

So, the question is, is Simply Hired associating itself with WhenU? Why? Is the only purpose of the ads to drive Simply Hired higher in the rankings of some of the metrics services? I have an email into their PR group, and await an answer.