Monster Worldwide Inc., which owns the top online recruiting site, took a beating on Wall Street this week after CareerBuilder, a rival owned by newspaper chains, said it would replace Monster as the exclusive job-listings provider on AOL and Microsoft's MSN.

Yet it is far from clear who is really winning in this mega-marketing divorce. Monster claims that it already has enough traffic and will save $50 million a year by not renewing with AOL and MSN. CareerBuilder, on the other hand, says its deal will allow it to overtake Monster in traffic and help persuade more employers to list their jobs at CareerBuilder, eventually at higher prices.

"It won't happen in four or five months, but over time I think this will make us the traffic leader," said Matt Ferguson, chief operating officer of CareerBuilder.

Such a boost won't come cheap. CareerBuilder agreed to pay AOL as much as $115 million over four years, more than the $100 million Monster committed to AOL during the dot-com mania of 1999. At the same time, CareerBuilder agreed to pay Microsoft as much as $150 million over five years.

The switcheroo shows how much confusion still rages over the value of portal advertising deals. But lest anyone think it proves that AOL and MSN still pack enormous marketing punch, the deals also show how hungry American newspapers are to reclaim classified ad revenue that is being gobbled up by Monster and other dot-coms.

Monster publicly pooh-poohed the significance of losing its spot on AOL and MSN, but sources at AOL said that Monster significantly increased its offer to AOL at the last minute in an effort to block CareerBuilder from grabbing the contract. By then, though, AOL was too far along in its negotiations with CareerBuilder and Monster's counteroffer didn't quite match its rival's, the sources said.

In an interview last week, Monster founder Jeffrey Taylor said Monster had some interest in renewing its portal deals, but not on the terms AOL and MSN expected. As the established leader in Internet recruiting, Monster wanted "pay-for-performance" terms that would have required Monster to pay mainly for new customers who actually used its services. But AOL wanted a large guaranteed payment upfront for touting Monster to AOL members, he said. Moreover, the two couldn't agree on how to measure performance.

Taylor said that ultimately Monster chose to renew neither deal because his site already has more job seekers than it can effectively match with employers. Monster's real challenge now, he said, is how to make itself more useful to job hunters and employers.

Internet job sites usually charge employers to place ads for openings. Job seekers can post resumés and browse listings free, firing off resumés when they see openings they like.

While Monster remains the traffic leader, it has been losing steam over the past year to rivals CareerBuilder and Yahoo HotJobs. Monster drew 15.6 million visitors in June, down 17 percent from October, according to ComScore Networks. During the same period, the number of people visiting CareerBuilder.com rose 50 percent, to 6.8 million in June, while HotJobs' traffic jumped 32 percent, to 8.6 million.

Taylor attributed Monster's decline partly to a drop in MSN traffic. Combined, he said, MSN and AOL accounted for a quarter of Monster's visitors, but he doesn't expect to lose many of them.

Clearly, though, Monster is facing more competition, especially from CareerBuilder, the national Web service owned by three large newspaper publishers: Knight Ridder Inc., Tribune Co. and Gannett Co. (Gannett is the parent company of The Honolulu Advertiser. The Washington Post Co. is an independent competitor, running its own local recruiting site at Washingtonjobs.com.)

CareerBuilder is a hybrid of print and electronic, charging newspaper advertisers to republish their listings online and also soliciting online-only listings. More than 100 participating newspapers have renamed their employment sections "CareerBuilder" to help market the service. In addition to negotiating deals with portals, CareerBuilder tripled its sales force over the past year and launched a national ad campaign.

CareerBuilder is still a lot smaller than Monster, with only 50 employees, compared with the 4,500 who work for Monster.com's parent company. And while CareerBuilder raked in $71 million in revenue in the first half of this year, Monster.com pulled in more than $200 million. Yahoo doesn't break out revenue for HotJobs.

Monster's revenue has been a sore spot with newspapers, because classified ads traditionally account for more than a third of the newspaper industry's total revenue. Newspaper help-wanted ads used to be the biggest chunk of classifieds, but they have been under assault for three years by the economy and Internet rivals, which offer employers a cheaper way to recruit.