Trinity Mirror has agreed to buy the classified advertising company Hotgroup for just over £50m.

The owner of the Daily Mirror is paying £50.5m in cash to acquire Hotgroup, which runs both online and traditional recruitment businesses.

The deal is the latest move by the newspaper group to capitalise on the migration of classified advertising to the internet.

Hotgroup, which has more than 2 million registered users, operates as a network of sites, including workthing.com, planetrecruit, jobsfinancial and hotrecruit.

Together the sites advertise between 30,000 and 40,000 job vacancies, and the network carries around 1m CVs.

The traditional advertising division comprises five recruitment consultancy businesses, which specialise in sectors such as education, law, pharmaceuticals, leisure and retail.

The company's chief executive, Sly Bailey, said: "We see exciting opportunities for the management and continued development of the Hotgroup alongside our existing recruitment advertising businesses, and the acquisition is consistent with our strategy of growing Trinity Mirror's core classified franchises both on- and off-line."

Today's deal follows last month's £13m acquisition of GAAPweb.com site, the country's leading online recruitment site for accountancy and financial services.

And in July, Trinity bought Smartnewhomes.com, a website marketing new-build homes, for £16.6m.

Other newspaper groups have been keen to build their presence online as they suffer from an uncertain advertising climate and faltering sales.

The Daily Mail & General Trust bought Jobsite in March 2004 for £35m, and last week snapped up the companies behind the sites top-consultant.com and officerecruit.co.uk in a £4m deal. The company also bought findaproperty.com in November for £14m.

Both DMGT and Trinity are partners - along with Newsquest and the Guardian Media Group - in the Fish4 group, which advertises cars, homes and jobs online.

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