Classifieds aggregation service provider Oodle is on a roll and definitely one of the startups worth following closely this year. After signing up two social networking juggernauts – both MySpace and Facebook – the company is now apparently also behind the just launched AOL Classifieds platform, per blog post by Greg Sterling.
The news comes right after a significant financing round announced earlier this month, when 3 VC firms invested $5.6 million in the company, bringing the total in funding raised to a healthy $21.6 million. Meanwhile, its traffic continues to surge (see Crunchbase profile for some upward-pointing visitor number graphs).
I would be very surprised if Oodle ends 2009 without being acquired for a price that puts a big smile on the faces of their investors.
For context, from the release:
AOL Classifieds is expected to serve as a platform for sellers to promote their listings by leveraging the reach of Oodle’s network of more than 250 partner sites.
Buyers can expect to find deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network, including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.
AOL Classifieds is the latest addition to the AOL Local Network, which is an online local network with a monthly reach of 54 million unduplicated unique visitors.In addition to the launch of AOL Classifieds in the U.S., a site for Canada is also available beginning today. An AOL Classifieds site for the UK will be launching later this week.
(Via Techmeme)
No one cares.
Oddle is hiring and you can checkout jobs at http://www.jobs...bkeywords=oodle
Thanks.
Correct spelling: Oodle. sorry.
AOL Classifieds sounds like a competitor to dollar tree
ha. AOL Classifieds. Will it be like craigslist?
Who needs AOL Classifieds when almost everyone in the world has access to Craigslist? So…is it just my imagination or is AOL once again jumping into a non-existent hole already quite adequately filled by someone else? First Bebo (Facebook and Myspace will forever ensure it loses money hand over fist) and now this. And after burning millions of subscribers with hard-to-cancel (sometimes impossible to cancel) accounts and buggy, uninstallable software over the years (AOL 5.0 and AOL 9.0, anyone?), goodwill for their brand has been demolished over so many years and with so many demographics that AOL Classifieds stands little chance – at least not in the US. I give it three months to fold.
Never mind. Just visited the site. I give it about three minutes. Did someone design that blindfolded or what?
I’m wondering how oodle compares to edgeio, a company Michael Arrington was involved with. I believe it also had something to do with the aggregation of classifieds.
Does anybody know what the differences are?
To a large degree Oodle is now executing Edgeio’s model. Matt Kaufman, former product dude at edgeio is at Oodle doing the same.
Edgeio didn’t go out of business due to failed business execution. It built a network of over 20 million classifieds in 1.5 years and was in discussions with AOL, MySpace and Facebook.
It’s venture investors at Intel can probably explain why it was closed down better than I
.
Keith Teare
With eBay (seemlingly) aspiring towards direct selling, there is definetly opportunities in auctions and I’m surprised Craigs List or oodle hasn’t moved into this space. (Classifieds and auctions seem to go hand in hand.)
craigslist has no plans to expand…
Why would AOL want start a classified ad site and fill it with recycled ads from Oodle ??
These recycled ads are on MySpace, Facebook, Walmart classified ads sites.
The public does not want more “recycled” classified ads.
There are only 2 sites that provide “original non recycled ads”
craigslist.org & thegrapevinecommunities.com
Hmm, that’s a lot of funding.. I love the clean look, nice blending of colors.. and of course the free part.
What would really be interesting is if they could launch a monetising program to sell their recycled ads on the partner sites.
Praveen
http://spraveen...ro.blogspot.com
We do have such a program. You can pull listings into your site via an API For example, Rockyou uses the API for monetization. We also have widgets in standard IAB sizes.
Check out http://developer.oodle.com
I don’t tend to say this kind of thing but Oodle is a really decent company to work with – they are really responsive. Once you are setup with them you just get loads of traffic and no grief.
Shame AOL is like the touch of rigor mortis- Expect nothing interesting to come out of this! However, i am sure Oodle will continue to thrive.
the rocket science of online classifieds is overwhelming. who in there right mind would call a company oodel? this is not 1998.
SellLocator.com – trade yourstuff
lol. once again, the irony is overwhelming.
I discovered this morning that Oodle is somehow connected to ShowMeLocal.com, because I added a local business on ShowMeLocal, and it automatically got listed on Oodle as well and the Oodle listing shows up on the first page of Google for a search related to the business name.
I think this could work depending on the quality of the sales. I can see this expanding to newspaper websites. Perhaps Oodle will be buying the NYT very soon.
that’s really nice to hear, Oodle being able to get both social network giants and a bonus AOL. Great work Oodle.
http://techfilipino.com
oodle is pretty nice and i like using it for some things but i still find myself going to search sites focused on specific verticals when it comes to things like jobs (indeed.com is awesome for job search), real estate (trulia beats oodle’s house search hands down). i also came across car classifieds specific search engines like iseecars.com. with oodle on such a roll, i wonder how classifieds sites like vast.com is doing and whether they’d be able to raise another round of funding.
I wonder what impact this will have on vast.com’s deal to power used car classifieds for AOL Autos, which launched last year.
From http://blog.kel...ers-with-oodle/ :
“While the announcement covers AOL’s Local and Specialty Verticals, it will link to — but not cover — AOL’s separate Marketplace categories. Marketplace includes AOL Travel, AOL Real Estate and AOL Autos. That means that the “vehicle” section of AOL Classifieds, for instance, only has listings for trucks, motorcycles and boats. It doesn’t have cars.
It also means that AOL Autos is sticking with Vast, a pay for performance classifieds search engine, for both AOL Autos and AOL Automoviles Latino.”
I wonder how this deal got away from KLaws hands ?
oodle is a great site, but I think this site can’t imitate social media sites moves, such as myspace and facebook.
On the other hands, ads are oodle specialization – so I can’t tell you it’s won’t work for sure.
I cant understand this deal, why would these giants use Oodle, are they not able to develop there own classifieds services?
the reason not to create your own, is because you’ll get many more combined listings across all sites, and since they are branding oodles results, its still traffic, and page views. It appears oodle is happy being a service to other sites. Craigslist is still the best, and copying what they’re doing is not enough.
Everybody is developing their own classifieds. Niche sites with free classifieds is the norm. Forget the classified aggregators. Who wants to use them? I will rather use niche unique sites, for example a new one for health and medical classifieds at http://www.mydo...om/classifieds/
I like Oodle, it’s pretty easy to use and classifieds at Oodle get pretty high results on Google.
Congrats Oodle!!!
what is oddle?
http://www.heal...tedirectory.com
Whoo Hoo. Check it out: classifieds.aol.com
Niceeee lots of things to buy and sell
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Fantastic review… Very well done…
Excellent review, although i feel that Facebook will eventually go the way of MySpace and will need to reinvent itself as there will be yet another big thing to over take it!
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