The company that owned Monster.com started out selling ads in the yellow pages. Andrew McKelvey founded it in 1967, and by 1996 TMP was the world's largest yellow page advertising agency. It also wrote help-wanted ads for employers, which gave it a reason to buy a small job site called The Monster Board. TMP went public in December 1996 at $14 a share. Monster was a footnote in the filing, and it became the reason anyone remembers the company.

Ads in the Phone Book

McKelvey built TMP around national advertisers that needed listings in thousands of local phone books. The second business was recruitment advertising: placing job ads in newspapers for big employers. Both paid commissions. In 1995 TMP bought the company behind The Monster Board, one of the earliest job sites on the web, started by Jeff Taylor. The bet was that help-wanted ads would move from newsprint to screens, and that an ad agency already serving the employers could carry them there.

From TMPW to Randstad

TMP sold shares at $14 on December 12, 1996, and listed on Nasdaq as TMPW. Monster grew into the best-known job site of the dot-com era, with a Super Bowl ad and a purple mascot. In 2003 the company spun off its staffing arm, sold off older lines and renamed itself Monster Worldwide. LinkedIn and Indeed later took much of its audience. The Dutch staffing firm Randstad bought Monster in 2016 for about $429 million.

Cover: The Sea Monster, Albrecht Dürer. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a sea monster (Monster).