Oodle CEO Q & A on eBay, Kijiji & Craigslist Classifieds
eBay Kijiji aims to impact the entire online classifieds market in the U.S., not just Craigslist.
Classifieds aggregator Oodle wants to aggregate everyone’s online classifieds listings, including Kijiji and Craigslist.
WHAT IS OODLE’S REACTION TO EBAY KIJIJI LAUNCHING IN THE UNITED STATES?
I asked Oodle CEO Craig Donato to find out. Below is our Q & A.
DB: Do you already work with Kijiji outside of the U.S.? For example, Kijiji is very strong in Canada and Oodle just launched in Canada.
DONATO: In the U.K., Oodle includes Gumtree listings, which is the local Kijiji brand, and Kijiji in Canada. We’re hopeful that we can work with them in the U.S. but we haven’t yet started to do so.
DB: How does Kijiji launching in the U.S. impact Oodle?
DONATO: It’s great for consumers and it’s great for Oodle. Providing consumers with choice is alays a good thing. And consumers are increasingly getting more options to post free classifieds listings. Obviously as consumers use more and different marjetplaces, Oodle becomes more useful. It’s also important to note that consumers don’t publish listings directly into Oodle. As a search engine, it is our goal to partner with all the classifieds marketplaces on the Internet, big and small, local and national.
DB: Oodle seeks to be the leading classifieds site in the U.S. Oodlefieds site in the U.S. Oodle aggregates 75, 000 sources for its 20 million listings monthly. Craigslist alone represents the same number of listings monthly. Can any company, even eBay, dethrone Craigslist?
DONATO: Yes, we’re already doing a great job without Craiglsist. First off, the market for Classifieds listings is more fragmented than most people realize. Consumers can usually find more listings through Oodle than through Craigslist. In certain metros, where Craigslist is very popular, the numbers are closer, especially in the merchandise category, where they are very strong. But even when you look across the Bay Area, Craigslist’s bigggest market, oodle has more than twice the number of car and apartment listings.
Second, Oodle provides a wide range of tools–alerts, pricing guides, fraud detection–to help consumers find the reigh lsitings in the right marketplace.
With repsect to Kijiji, I do believe ebay can be successful. Unlike an auction, where you have to choose one venue to list your item, it makes sense for consumers to publish thier clasifieds in multiple places, epsecially ehen they are easy to use and free. So there’s no reason for consumers to not publish their lsitings in both Kijiji and Craigslist.
DB: Can Oodle be a leader in the classifieds industry without access to Craigslist listings? Is Craigslist a “walled garden”?
DONATO: Oodle can be a leader by best serving the needs of consumers trying to buy, or rent, things through classifieds. Consumers find great deals though classifieds, but its typically a painful and time consuming experience. We can lead by providing great tools that simplify the shopping experience and by partnering with clasified marketplaces across the Internet.
For example, when you’re looking for a used car, it’s great to go to one place to help you see al the local listings in your area. Our pricing guides help you figure out what’s a good price to pay and how often deals at the price pop up; If you tell Oodle what model you’re looking for, we’ll email you when one is posted.
Craigslist a walled garden? Yes, I guess you could say trhey are acting like one. They are putting up a wall between the listings that consumers publish in their marketplace and those consumers that may want to use a search engine or other tool to help them shop with online classifieds.
DB: Does eBay entering the U.S. classifieds marketplace change the Oodle business plan?
DONATO: NO. Indeed, we’ve been surprised to see so few companies come out and offer free classifieds. We’ve alwys believed that a vibrant ecosystem of classifieds marketplaces will serve a variety of local and Internet communities.
Search is generally recognized as playing a useful role to both consumers and ecommerce sites on the Internet today. The need for search in classifieds is even more pronounced.
With classifieds, you’re looking for one unique thing, such as that dream apartment, that perfect job, that disappears when someone else buys it, so classifieds need to be very timely. Also, classifieds listings tend to be poorly described with lots of unstructured data, so they are hard to search.
Classiifeds is very diferent than say searching for a specific Olympus camarea that is mainly about securing the best price. Consumers benefit as competing classifieds marketplaces innovate.
Thanks Craig!
For more exclusive Insider Chatter classifieds CEO interviews, see: Oodle CEO: Classifieds are Local, and Social and Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: ‘My life is a sitcom’