AOL Time Warner Inc. and Microsoft moved within hours of each other to sign deals with online job listings venture CareerBuilder.com, replacing relationships with rival Monster.com.

Microsoft's online service company, MSN, will be paid up to US$150 million over five years to funnel traffic to CareerBuilder.com, the companies said Tuesday in a joint statement. The service will start in January 2004.

AOL Time Warner's American Online unit will be paid up to $115 million over four years to provide the same service, beginning in mid-December 2003, the U.S. media giant and online job-listings service provider said Monday in a joint statement.

To generate as much traffic as possible, AOL Time Warner plans to offer the service to customers not only of its online unit but also its ISP (Internet service provider) units, CompuServe and Netscape, as well the media subsidiaries Time Inc. and Cable News Network LP LLP (CNN).

The new deals with CareerBuilder follow Monday's announcement by Monster Worldwide Inc., the parent company of Monster.com, that it would not renew agreements with AOL and MSN, due to expire at the end of the year.

The decision to let the contracts expire is part of a strategy to redirect about $50 million yearly on targeted marketing initiatives to raise Monster's overall advertising mix, including broadcast television, the company said Monday in a statement.

Monster Worldwide, which is located in Maynard, Massachusetts, operates a global job-listings network consisting of local content Web sites in nearly two dozen countries, several of which are in Europe, as well as the U.S., Hong Kong and Singapore.

CareerBuilder.com is jointly owned by the U.S. newspaper companies Gannett Co. Inc., Tribune Company and Knight Ridder Inc., spanning more than 100 newspapers across the States. The Web site offers job seekers more than 400,000 continuously updated job postings from more than 25,000 of the top employers in almost every industry, field and location, according to the statement.