Online classifieds service Oodle is reporting decent growth in the first month of 2009 with over 10 million visits (both Quantcast and Compete reflect a significant traffic surge). Add to that the fact that social networking juggernaut Facebook has selected the company to power its classified listings application and you know they’re on to something over at the San Mateo, CA-based startup.
Its investors seem to agree, as they have just injected more capital in Oodle: Greylock Partners, JAFCO Ventures and Redpoint Ventures are adding another $5.6 million to the startup’s war chest, bringing the total amount invested in the company to $21.6 million.
Oodle is already powering the classified listings for MySpace, and the roll-out for the Facebook Platform is supposed to start this quarter, effectively replacing an in-house solution (Facebook Marketplace) in favor of a product developed by an outside company, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent interview with Michael Arrington.
Finally, a nicer looking alternative to Gumtree!
Anyone who can raise funds in this environment deserves respect.
Good luck to the oodle team
Anjali Sen
Good luck to the oodle team
yes, Oodle deserves the credit as one of the top classified sites globally, hope that it do well with facebook venture to increase their visitors count.
Congrats to Oodle. While I like Oodle and use it to search for things like used aeron chairs, I still find the domain-specific classifieds search engines to be better and more useful like Trulia for real estate, Indeed.com for jobs, and iSeeCars.com for car search.
Oodle is a good business idea and it’s also a good strategy on how they are implementing their platform across social network.
I went on board for a month using their PPC advertising from Oodle, one thing that is lacking and that is transparency of the PPC advertising from their network.
I can see that I received 1,000 visitors for the month but I can’t tell which of those I was paying for and which was free. They told me I received 600 clicks because I was paying a fee for my product to show at the top of search result. I guess I have to take their word for it.
What about those item that is unique that I’m selling and I’m the only seller, with these item I will be at the top of the search even if I pay or not. I notice I still pay for these clicks even if I’m the only seller.
I think Oodle needs to tweak the PPC search result for advertiser. If I’m the only seller for an item, they should charge me for that click when I’m the only seller shows up in the search result.
Right now, that item is showing at the top of Oodle search result and I’m not paying for it. Now, what they should do is configure the PPC so that if I’m the only seller for a particular item, they dont charge me for that click when customer searches for my item.
I think they will get better in the coming months.
Anthony,
You said you got 1,000 clicks. How was the quality of the visitors – were you able to measure any conversion ?
Vertical search market has huge opportunities to improve. The incumbents arent doing the job right. Oodle is a great example.
At Cazoodle, we also believe in making vertical search more organic, and comprehensive. Our first product, apartment search engine, has far more coverage than any other vertical in the space:
http://apartments.cazoodle.com
And no, we were not influenced by Oodle when naming our startup as Cazoodle.
Govind
Congrats to Oodle! We receive a good amount of traffic from the ads we syndicate to Oodle. It’s a great directory that does return traffic to your site.
Congrats Craig, Scott and Faith! (And the rest of the Oodle team)
yeah to our buddy Scott Kister and gang! *hi scott! congrats!!*
Myspace & Facebook…..pretty darn good start, if you had to pick a couple clients.
I’m not convinced by Oodle – they are almost entirely reliant at the moment on the co-operation of other classified sites for the content that they then syndicate, it would be pretty easy for this to be turned off.
Additionally from an admission at a conference from a senior Oodle executive they’ve yet to grow a new marketplace with any of the deals they’ve done eg MySpace, The Sun newspaper in the UK. Of course this may say more about why people are using these sites ie not for classifieds – but it’s still strange.
Let’s hope Oodle goes after the classifieds market in Latin America!