Editor’s note: Guest writer Craig Donato is the CEO of Oodle, a social maretplace that powers the Facebook Marketplace.
Ecommerce today is imbued with the same DNA that runs through Google. It’s automated. It’s algorithmic. It’s certainly not human. And the marketing campaigns that are built with this DNA are similarly data-driven. They employ number-crunchers to capture their leads and build their databases, all the while looking for incremental ROI and arbitrage opportunities.
But a new marketing game has come to town—social commerce. And at its core is an entirely different bit of DNA: the DNA of Facebook. This new variety of social commerce is about conversations. It’s about relationships. It’s about re-humanizing online commerce. And for marketers to succeed with social commerce, they are going to have to rethink their game plan. Facebook has given us a brand new color palette. Now it’s up to us to figure out how to use it. I like to call this learning process “de-ecommercification.” → Read More
When Oodle started out six years ago as a classifieds search engine, it’s focus was all around search and bringing together the best classified ads from all over the web. Today, it still does that, but increasingly it is moving more and more towards social classifieds. “We are 100 percent committed to social,” CEO Craig Donato tells me.
Oodle already powers the Facebook Marketplace, perhaps the largest business app on the social network. Of the company’s 14 million total users a month, 6 million are on Facebook. And tonight it plans to roll out a slew of new social features. → Read More
In the venture business being ahead of your time can be almost as bad as being late to a market. But the other great thing about the venture business is there are exceptions to every rule. Craig Donato is hoping that Oodle is the exception to that one. He’s spent more than ten years building a social classified company, powering the marketplaces for Oodle.com, MySpace and Facebook and growing to more than 14 million unique users. It’s backed by some of the smartest investors on the Web like Reid Hoffman and David Sze from Greylock, who both invested in Facebook and LinkedIn so they know a thing or two about the social graph.
Now one of Facebook’s other hot venture capital investors, Accel Partners, has funded Yardsellr which claims it’ll be the “eBay of Facebook;” meanwhile Groupon’s runaway success has made everyone reevaluate social shopping. So what does all that mean for Oodle?
For one thing, the company isn’t slowing down. → Read More
In online classifieds, as with any marketplace, the more buyers and sellers a company can bring together, the more listings it can generate. Oodle is about to add 1.6 million groups to its social commerce platform. Oodle is acquiring Grouply in a deal which could be announced as soon as today.
Oodle powers social classifieds on Facebook and MySpace. Now, presumably, it will offer classifieds as an option on Grouply sites as well. → Read More
Online classifieds service Oodle is socializing its listings with a new interface that allows users to publish listings directly to their social streams on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter. Oodle already powers the classifieds listings for Facebook and MySpace. The startup announced the new feature last year, but is rolling it out today.
Users connect to their social identities via oAuth, Facebook Connect and MySpaceID directly from Oodle, allowing you to publish a status update or send out a Tweet with a listing. And people who are looking at Oodle listings will be able to Tweet or publish the posts out from the site. Oodle will also soon enable users to connect to their accounts on LinkedIn, eBay, Trulia and Zillow. → Read More
OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.
Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe. OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world. → Read More
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). → Read More
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. → Read More
As we speculated last month, Facebook is about to hand over its official classifieds listings to a partner, and that partner is Oodle, we have been able to confirm. An announcement may be made as early as tomorrow.
What is interesting about this deal is that Oodle already powers the classifieds on MySpace. Even though Facebook and MySpace are archrivals, this makes sense because in classifieds scale matters. The more listings and the more people seeing those listings, the better. → Read More
Here’s a rumor that won’t go away – Facebook has been quietly searching for a partner to take over their year and a half old classified listings application, and may relaunch as early as the end of December.
According to our sources, Facebook distributed a request-for-proposal to a number of classified sites earlier this year (the same model they are using for Facebook Music).
The obvious partner is Oodle, which began powering Walmart Classifieds earlier this year. We’ve heard thin reports that they in fact have won the contract.
Whoever powers Facebook Classifieds (or Facebook Marketplace, as they call it) has a big hill to climb. Competing with Ebay (and their Kijiji) and Craigslist isn’t trivial. The original thought was that social networks were great for classifieds because you the buyers and sellers know each other. But Facebook’s current classifieds system shows anemic listings. The Silicon Valley network, for example, had a total of ten new listings added yesterday. San Francisco had twenty. New York City – zero. And for those who’ve forgotten, Microsoft launched their own classifieds site based on MSN friends and private networks (like businesses), and it went nowhere. → Read More
Since the last time we gave an update at the beginning of the month there have been 20,171 layoffs at tech and media companies added to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 58,709 tech layoffs over the past two and a half months.
One previously unreported layoff we have been able to confirm is 10 people at classifieds search engine Oodle, which occurred last week and represents a 20% reduction. Another layoff happened at Rearden Commerce, which trimmed about 40 people, or 10 percent (and Rearden just raised $100 million, showing that no company is immune).
The biggest layoff this month was announced just today by Sun Microsystems, which will be reducing its headcount by 5,000 to 6,000 (15 to 18 percent). Other big tech companies also announced cuts earlier this week, including Applied Materials (1,800 layoffs), Nokia Siemens Networks (750), and National Semiconductor (330). → Read More
Microsoft Live Expo, their experiment with classified listings that launched in early 2006, will be shut down on July 31, says a notice posted on the site. New listings have already been suspended. This comes as Craigslist solidifies its position as the top free listings service. Other services like Kijiji (owned by eBay) and Oodle (which recently partnered with Walmart) continue to grow. Recently Kijiji has made waves about their impressive growth rate. And other classified listing startups continue to get funded. There’s just no room for Microsoft in the classified listings space, it seems. It joins the deadpool. A screen shot of what it looked like in the good days is below. → Read More
Walmart has added a classified listings service to their site. Silicon Valley startup Oodle, which was founded in 2004, is powering the service. The listings are free, which means Walmart is likely doing the deal to generate page views and advertising impressions. They also now compete with both Craigslist and eBay-owned Kijiji. Walmart has a mixed history of success with Web businesses, but Walmart.com attracts 26 million visitors a month in the.U.S., according to comScore. Amazon attracts 47 million. The classifieds listing’s went up quietly last week on Walmart’s site. The deal should help Oodle compeet against eBay’s Kijiji, which recently passed it in in the U.S., with 2 million unique visitors in April, versus 1.3 million for Oodle. Both trail way behind Craigslist, which has 30 million uniques, and is currently embroiled in a nasty lawsuit with eBay over Kijiji’s market entry into the U.S. CrunchBase Information Oodle Kijiji Craigslist Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Classifieds search engine Oodle has just pushed through a major upgrade to its Website, which searches 30 million active classifieds listings across the Web. It is also testing an ad network across other sites that drops a local classified from Oodle’s paid listings at the bottom of a related classifieds search on a partner site as backfill, or as a contextual ad on the side of a page. Oodle’s new interface offers better guided search across its nine categories (cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, pets, tickets, personals, services, and items for sale). This includes the ability to refine your search in a hunt-and-peck way by selecting multiple sub-categories at once (for instance, you can look for apartments in both Williamsburg and Tribeca, or for Toyotas and BMWs, all in one search). Depending what category you are looking in there are also lots of helpful geographical sliders and other suggested ways to parse your search (by breed, for pets; by make, price, year or mileage for cars; by neighborhood, square feet, or amenities for real estate; by gender, sexual preference, marital status, smoking habits, hair color, and zodiac sign for personals). Oodle surfaces comparative pricing information in a handy graph for categories where it has enough data, such as cars. (The average price for a used Mini Cooper in New York City, for example, is $18,132 and the 2007 models show the steepest price declines). It also gives an inventory forecast—”We found 258 listings and expect 35 more next week”—based on historical patterns. Most search results can also be seen on a Google map. . CEO Craig Donato wants to make searching for classifieds across the Web as easy as searching for any retail product or service. But classifieds are a strange beast. He describes some of the challenges people encounter when looking for something listed as a classified: When it is gone, it is gone—because it is one of a kind. Listings are poorly described and spread across many different sites. Searching is time-consuming. You are not just searching, you are hunting. And good deals tend to go quickly. His approach at Oodle is to make such searches easier by adding guided categories to help people refine their searches, e-mail alerts and inventory forecasts to help people keep track of listings over time, price comparison tools to help them make a buying decision, and sophisticated spam detection to help them → Read More
Classified search engine Oodle got a pile of cash today, $11 million from new investor JAFCO Ventures and the leaders of their previous $5 million round, Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Like LiveDeal, Edgeio, and Vast, Oodle repackages and aggregates classified listings from around the web to make them easily searched by category, attributes, and location. Google Base also dipped its feet into this territory. Oodle’s model is taking on nearly every established vertical search by hosting listings for cars, real estate, rentals, jobs, personals, merchandise, tickets, pets, and services. Oodle has expanded its listings through direct postings and a series of local listings partners, which it syndicates on sites like Yell.com, Local.com. include Engage.com, Local.com, ticket sellers, real estate brokers, colleges, and newspapers. However, Last year they lost their Craigslist feed. Edgeio and Vast are growing through slightly different ways. Edgeio has been partnering up with feeds from international sites, earning revenue by splitting listing fees (Edgeio marketplaces is a good example). Vast has been growing by crawling the deep web that lies behind login and search forms. Oodle reports 20 million active listings from more than 75,000 sources in the US and the UK, when compared to Edgeio’s over 100 million international listings and Vast’s 25 million classified listings across 70,000 sites. Oodle, however, has some more advanced search features than these others, adding price tracking and maps where it makes sense. Their price tracking is a more basic version of what Mpire is offering in the shopping vertical. Disclosure: Michael Arrington is a founder and director of Edgeio. → Read More
I wrote about this last week – and Oodle now has officially added events and tickets as a category. This seem to be primarily a combination of meetup events and tickets from a number of ticket brokers, including stubhub. There’s lots on money in this space from affiliate fees, so it’s a smart move. → Read More
Oodle a vertical search engine for classified ads, is set to add events as a category in the next week or so. Oodle’s current categories include For Sale, Cars, Housing, Jobs and Services. With events, they will have the ability to pair revenue-generating services such as ticket sales and related items with the classifieds. Oodle clearly needs to find new ways to generate excitement. Traffic is flattish and they recently lost the feed from Craigslist, an important source of classified ads. Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner. I hope they find a way to make their model work. → Read More
