Did you hear? SEEK, the Aus­tralian job board giant, is mov­ing from a sub­scrip­tion-based rev­enue mod­el to vari­able – or surge – pric­ing.

Um…what’s that, you may ask. Well…it is lin­ing up the price for a job ad with the val­ue it rep­re­sents to the employ­er at a giv­en point in time. In oth­er words – no fixed pric­ing, and instead, pric­ing depen­dent on what is deliv­ered. You could call it, um, pay for per­for­mance.

This move is inter­est­ing for a num­ber of rea­sons. First – if you did­n’t know already – SEEK is big. It gen­er­ates about $1B USD a year. Also, it oper­ates not only in Aus­tralia and New Zealand, but in South­east Asia, South Amer­i­ca, and a num­ber of oth­er mar­kets. And it’s been suc­cess­ful – thus far – at keep­ing Indeed at bay in the Aus­tralian mar­ket. But…as a pub­licly held com­pa­ny – and a near monop­oly – there is a con­stant drum­beat to increase rev­enues – which, by the way, grows hard­er the big­ger you get. Thus, vari­able pric­ing, which SEEK believes can dri­ve up prof­itabil­i­ty sig­nif­i­cant­ly. The less you leave on the table, the more you make, in oth­er words.

SEEK first men­tioned their plans to move the Pre­mi­um ads to surge pric­ing back in April. As they point­ed out, there were chal­lenges – both tech­ni­cal and con­tract-relat­ed.

The stock mar­ket liked SEEK’s move – shares moved up 16% dur­ing the three weeks after their April announce­ment. Yet the com­pa­ny con­tin­ues to be some­what vague about the details of how one of these ads are enhanced and val­ued. As Aus­tralian recruit­ment expert Ross Clen­nett point­ed out, “As to the specifics, you’re out of luck if you want more than the vagaries of the FAQs.”

Apart from extract­ing more rev­enue from their cus­tomers, it appears that SEEK’s change is a response to Indeed and oth­er pay for per­for­mance ven­dors. Unlike the capit­u­la­tion by U.S. mar­ket lead­ers to Indeed, SEEK is deter­mined to main­tain its hold on Aus­tralia and New Zealand.

Will it work? Well, SEEK’s track record thus far is pret­ty impres­sive. I would­n’t bet against them.

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