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Microsoft said Wednesday that it would take a small equity stake in CareerBuilder, a popular job recruitment site operated by three big media companies. The deal deepens an existing partnership in a lucrative category of online classified advertising. Officials at CareerBuilder and the Tribune Company, one of the current owners, put the stake at 4 percent, though neither they nor Microsoft would disclose the amount invested. The site’s other owners are the Gannett Company and the McClatchy Company.
Under the deal, CareerBuilder will continue to be the exclusive job search engine on Microsoft’s MSN site through 2013, and will pay Microsoft up to $443 million. The exact amount paid by CareerBuilder will depend on how much traffic MSN drives to the site, the companies said.
Since the partnership with Microsoft began in January 2004, traffic at CareerBuilder has grown from about 10 million visitors a month to more than 21 million, the companies said.
“It has been a great relationship for us,” said Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president for online services at Microsoft.
Mr. Berkowitz said Microsoft’s equity investment in CareerBuilder was intended to ensure that Microsoft would share in any future value created by the partnership.
“It says we’re in this for the long haul,” he said. The new alliance will help CareerBuilder with a planned international expansion, he said.
CareerBuilder competes directly with other employment sites like Monster.com and HotJobs on Yahoo, which itself has a partnership with a consortium representing more than 260 newspaper Web sites.
The deal potentially heightens the rivalry between MSN and Yahoo, two of the leading Internet portals, which compete to attract users with news and entertainment content, as well as e-mail, instant messaging and other offerings. Yahoo recently announced a deal with publishers representing 264 newspapers, including McClatchy, to sell national advertising across their Web sites.
Despite the rivalry, Yahoo and Microsoft executives came together here on Wednesday amid high expectations that the companies might announce some kind of partnership.
But as Terry S. Semel, chief executive of Yahoo, addressed representatives of hundreds of marketers and advertising agencies at a conference convened by Microsoft, and later sat down for an onstage conversation with Joanne K. Bradford, chief media officer for MSN, there was not a single reference to a possible deal.
Instead, the talk was all about the forces that are shaping the online advertising industry: international expansion, mobile devices and interactive video.
Mr. Semel did make the obligatory dig at Google, which is outflanking both Microsoft and Yahoo in online advertising.
Referring to the video-sharing site acquired last year by Google, Mr. Semel said that either Microsoft or Yahoo could have chosen to build “YouTube look-alike” sites that disregarded copyrights. Instead, he said, both companies chose to be partners with Hollywood studios and television networks.
Unlike many of the other speakers at the two-day event, Mr. Semel took no questions from the audience.
Yahoo Closing Auction Service
SAN FRANCISCO, May 9 (AP) — Yahoo will close its online auction service for North America next month, signaling its intention to focus on more profitable endeavors.
The company’s auctions in the United States and Canada, begun nine years ago, will end June 16, although some tools will remain accessible until Oct. 29. The move will not affect its auction services in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan.

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