TMP Worldwide, the owner of Monster.com, has bought the domain name and trademark of Jobs.com, a struggling competitor operating under bankruptcy protection.

It just goes to show that there is life yet in the domain names market - but a top bid of 800K for Jobs.com is a far cry from what such a generic URL would have got in the late '90s.

Jobs.com had 400K unique visitors in the first two months of 2002 - so TMP gets a nice boost to market share on the cheap, as well as the domain name, the trademark, the cuddly toy etc. etc.

It looks like TMP is going to use Jobs.com as its low-rent jobs portal, concentrating on the hourly paid job sector. It's striking deals with US government agencies and looking for "potential newspaper partners in small areas" to populate the site with jobs. ®