Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator instructions) Our first question will come from the line of John Janedis with Wachovia. Please proceed.
John Janedis - Wachovia
Hi, good morning. Can you guys talk a bit about more on the Dice business? Obviously it's changed a lot since the last employment downturn, but can you give us a sense of maybe what the renewals were back in the '01, '02, or '03 timeframe?
Scott W. Melland
Yes, John. We used to track it slightly differently so I can't compare apples to apples, but I can tell you that in the '01 period, we saw customer account reductions in the many hundreds per month. So the customer retention rate was far lower than we've seen now because the customer distribution was far different back then.
It was much more dominated by entities that don't exist anymore. I guess I would add to that that this environment is not even close to what we saw in '01 and '02 in terms of what happened with many technology companies essentially just dumping their people on the street. This is not that environment at all.
John Janedis - Wachovia
Okay. And maybe somewhat related, you implied eFC growth estimates for 4Q shows pretty rapid deceleration there. I know the contract structures have been different from Dice, but how are the relative renewal rates looking from one to the other?
Michael P. Durney
Yes, the contract, we don't talk about renewal rates at eFC. The contracts, they are different, they are adjustable or cancelable on notice despite the fact that they're annual agreements. Customers can typically adjust them. We have seen some, we have certainly seen more recently than we saw during the third quarter and earlier in the year, but I have to say we haven't seen a lot of them.
John Janedis - Wachovia
Okay and maybe just one last quick one. Given the comments about increases in total resume volume, is there a way that you're working on to maybe try to monetize that increase there?
Scott W. Melland
Well, one of the things that we are working on and, in fact, we launched a product during the quarter in sort of a test mode launch, we worked on a product called Dice Advantage, which is a service that is sold directly to the job seekers, which provides certain benefits to them, enable them to have highlighted listing of their resume in the resume database, gives them the opportunity to see who has viewed their resume.
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