What future for job aggregators

Should job boards be quaking in their boots or will job aggregators just be a sideshow to the real event?

I personally feel that overall the job aggregators are doing a good job and pushing new technology into online recruitment in a great way; which is more than can be said for some jobs!

But, they primarily rely on job content from job boards who themselves may start to question the value they get from the aggregators - unless of course they own the aggregator.  For example, Totaljobs Group own Goyocal so they of course will like the concept.  However, will TJ want the likes of Indeed, Workhound, Allthetopbananas etc beating them in the search engines with the 'job boards jobs' and then diverting traffic that would have ordinarily gone direct to the job board but now may see some other jobs that they look at instead.  No different to how job boards work when they attract applicants with clients jobs who then go to the job board but again may see something else of more interest.

Furthermore, do the aggregators contribute any original content of their own other than sponsored links? 

It could be that a simple automated job aggregator with very few staff will get more traffic than some of the biggest job boards who invest a lot of time and money convincing employers and agencies to advertise with them and job seekers to visit their sites.

Of course the aggregators may crow about this.  They will claim that this is the future of online recruitment and the job seekers rather than the job boards will decide what is important and what’s not. There’s only one problem.

Without the real jobs, aggregation sites and all the others that provide little or no content of their own could not exist.  However, pure aggregation is not the future. If it was, the aggregators would eventually do themselves out of a job. The future of online recruitment will remain in the hands of all the employers, large and small, that take the time to think about what and how they advertise online. 

And in the meantime they will just continue to use job boards who could kill the aggregators at anytime - unless of course they do something more radical!!