Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

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’

PLUS: Backfence.com and Google: Money Can’t Buy Local Love

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Craigslist is NOT concerned that Web auction leader, and minority shareholder in Craigslist, eBay is flexing its $44 billion market cap muscle to muscle in on the online classifieds space, right in Craigslist’s own backyard.

Why not? Both Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, and CEO, Jim Buckmaster, have long had a public stance of “bring on the competition,” because choice is good, for classifieds users.

When I asked Buckmaster last week if charges that Craigslist is a “walled garden” are justified, he underscored the Craigslist principle to not impede “competition”:

Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere.

WHAT IF Craigslist DID “worry about” what other companies are doing in the online classifieds space?

eBay is crystal clear in its intent. Spokesperson Hani Durzy:

This is going to be our classified ad play in the United States. We look at it as competition to Craigslist and other platforms. But we think there is room for competition.

Craigslist’s Buckmaster is also clear: “Many companies offer classifieds. We don’t think of them as competition, or as a challenge to Craigslist.” Perhaps more to the competitive point, Newmark has oft noted that efforts to “emulate” Craigslist are a regular occurence.

Will eBay Kijiji be the one to succeed in out Craigslisting Craigslist? NO. Here are ten reasons why:

DOMAIN NAME: Incomprehensible, hard to say, difficult to spell.

eBay GOODWILL: No connection for users of Kijiji.

eBay TRAFFIC: Not to be leveraged for Kijiji.

USER ACQUISIITON: Costly reliance on paid and “natural” redirection of search engine destination traffic.

CLASSIFIEDS MODEL: Undifferentiated implementation of Craigslist.

TIERED SERVICES: Will eventually be upsell driven.

ADVERTISING: Will eventually be advertising fueled.

MISSION: eBay shareholder profits.

SOUL: Corporate.

PHILOSOPHY: Kill the competiton, Craigslist included.

When Craig Newmark is asked about the classifieds efforts of others as “Craigslist killers,” he undersocres an inherent appeal of his namesake site is that it really is driven by a singular purpose to “give people a break.”

In other words, while it may be easy for a well financed corporation to physically build another Craigslist, a publicly traded $44 billion market cap business will be hard pressed to “emulate” a people come before profits core operating principle.

Right out of the U.S. Kijiji gate, in fact, eBay’s take no classifieds prisoners fiercly competitive stance is in stark contrast to Craigslist’s collegial welcome of eBay to the online classifieds world.

In its report “eBay starts U.S. version of its classifieds site,” the San Francisco Chronicle cites a dissatisfied user of Craigslist, Heather Castro.

Castro reports ”not getting much response” from her Craigslist ad, so she welcomes Kijiji. Who turned Castro on to the would be eBay Craigslist killer? An eBay accountant, her husband.

He mentioned it over dinner and I fgured why not. I wanted to get my message out there. Craigslist is a little bit busy, so I tried Kijiji and realized, wow, this is not busy at all…Once they get people using it, it will be a great way to network.

eBay is clearly getting ITS big classifieds business message out there. BUT if history predicts the future, non-eBay employee users of Craiglslist will not be swayed.

While Buckmaster oversees the daily operation of Craigslist, Newmark works on the user facing front. How committed is Newmark to serving users at Craigslist?  In New York City recently, Newmark shared that he is dedicated to serving as Craigslist “Customer Service Representative” forever, literally.

Craig’s stance on Craigslist? “The exit strategy is death.”

READ MY EXCLUSIVE CRAIGSLIST INTERVIEWS: Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist’s Craig Newmark: ‘My life is a sitcom’

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Who owns local online? Local.com undoubedtly believes it has some proprietary rights, announcing U.S. Patent # 7,231,405 for location-based search today.

Is anyone taking ownership of classifieds online, itself an inherently local application, and social, according to two key online classifieds players: Craigslist and Oodle.

In my recent conversations with Craig Newmark of namesake Craigslist and Craig Donato, founder & CEO of Oodle, both entrepreneurs stressed the ability of online classifieds marketplaces to emulate offline social interactions encouraged by the real world trade of goods and services between individuals at the local level.

NEWMARK: Craigslist strives for creating a “culture of trust” at Craigslist, the “online flea market.” A neighborhood flea market is as much about socializing as it is about commerce and Craigslist moves the commerce as social experience to the Web.

DONATO: Oodle “connects” users that want to “hunt for great deals,” via interactive, social tools such as “instant alerts” and an entertainment calendar.

In striving to make the classifieds shopping experience more “personal and immediate,” Oodle aims to become the go-to online classifieds destination. Oodle says it aggregates 20 million listings monthly, from 75,000 classifieds partners, with the notable exception of Craigslist.

Craigslist itself directly gets 20 million classifieds ad postings monthly, according to Craigslist.

NEWMARK: “What connects people on Craigslist is the expectation of real human interaction.” The experience is not just like real life, but it aims to be a personal, genuine and authentic experience, mediated through technology.

Why does Craigslist believe its “authentic” classifieds community is best served by restricting classifieds aggregators, such as Oodle, and classifieds mashup players, such as Listpic, from accessing Craigslist classifieds ads postings? I asked Craigslist President & CEO Jim Buckmaster just that. Below is our Q & A.

DB: Craigslist is exploring ideas for making Craigslist even more social. The Web 2.0 movement believes “social” requires Web sites have open doors to third party Websites, such as Facebook seeks to do with F8. In the eyes of many in the Web 2.0 community, not allowing third party Websites to access Craigslist data for aggregating at vertical search engines or for creating mashups for unique ways to view the lisitngs (ie. Oodle, Listpic) means Craigslist is a “walled garden.” What is your response to such a Web 2.0 argument against a proprietary, closed Craigslist?

BUCKMASTER: “Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere

Likewise, I have never before heard the term “proprietary” applied to craigslist, given our well-known near-exclusive reliance on free software.

Although we’re actually more of a Web 0.0 company at heart (non-commercial focus on serving the user), Tim O’Reilly, the ultimate authority on all things Web 2.0, has on quite a few occasions assured us that we are very Web 2.0, which helps us sleep at night.

We direct our efforts based entirely on input from our users, leaving little energy for worrying about how we fit in with various marketing and business development buzzwords and catchphrases.

DB: What is the Craigslist community’s reaction to efforts of third-party Websites to aggregate and/or manipulate the classifieds ads they post?

BUCKMASTER: We have received vanishingly few requests from craigslist users that we open the site to companies that want to capitalize on the craigslist community–in fact it’s been quite the contrary, we generally receive complaints from users when sites create derivative services based on craigslist, particularly commercial ones.

DB: How does Craigslist prevent third-party Websites from accessing Craigslist listings without authorization?

BUCKMASTER: Thousands of entities, large and small, attempt to spider/harvest/auto-post or otherwise robotically interact with our site each month, competing with our users for server cycles, and otherwise compromising the site–preventing such actiivty is one of the many things keeping our highly talented tech team busy these days.

DB: What is the Craigslist infrastructrue comprised of?

BUCKMASTER: Craigslist uses a 3 tier architecture:Cache->Web->Database and deploys approximately 200 Intel-based servers built to our specs with a LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, perl) framework. Mod_perl , mod_gzip; 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.

DB: Does Craigslist allow search engines, such as Google, to access Craigslist data? Does Google show Craigslist ads posted by the Craigslist community in their SERPs?

BUCKMASTER: We have for many years allowed search engines such as Google to index much of the site (as long as their indexing software is well behaved). Although individual listings do appear in SERPs, most results point at our top level index pages, which our users (and the general public) seem to appreciate.

DB: How many pageviews does Craigslist process monthly?

BUCKMASTER: Approximately 7.5 billion.

Thanks to Jim Buckmaster, Craig Newmark and Craig Donato!

ALSO: Google Human Powered Search: Who Needs Mahalo?

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN

Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame, shared with me today that sometimes it feels that his life is just like a “sitcom.”

Craig is on an extended New York City sojurn. He addressed the Social Media Club last Thursday and is speaking at the Japan Society tomorrow about ”Digital Social Responsibility.” In between, I met with him this morning at a not-quite-San Francisco style NYC outdoor cafe: A heavy on the concrete Au Bon Pain “garden” outpost in midtown Manhattan.

I hoped to share one of the secret treasures of midtown Manhattan with Craig, a real (beautiful) United Nations garden overlooking Manhattan’s East River. However, not only does the UN garden entry now require a security process akin to checking in at the airport, the “oasis” also apparently adheres to (old school) banking hours!

Regardless of the environment, it is always a pleasure to chat with Craig, about Craigslist, and life.

During our wide ranging discussion, we spoke about how negativity fuels a big part of big media work. Why is that so? Craig suggested that what gets people’s attention is “anger or comedy.” Craig quickly added, “my life is a sitcom!” We all tend to exaggerate for comedy relief, Craig said.

While all our lives may be like sitcoms, Craigslist strives for creating a “culture of trust” at Craigslist, the “online flea market.” A neighborhood flea market is as much about socializing as it is about commerce, Craig underscored. Craiglsist moves the commerce as social experience to the Web, Craig noted.

“What connects people on Craiglsist is the expectation of real human interaction,” Craig told me. The experience is not just like real life, but it aims to be a personal, genuine and authentic experience, mediated through technology.

As such, Craigslist “customers” have a sesnse that they are dealing with real people on a human basis, as opposed to a corporate basis, Craig indicated. Corporations can be impersonal, or they try to be personal, but it sometimes comes off in a phony way, Craig said.

Craig, of course, is enthusiastic about the personal empowerment that the Internet enables. “The Internet is everyone’s printing press, where the cost of entry is zero,” Craig said. Moreover, a good blogging tool requires “no technology knowledge.”

Since everone has a voice now, the challenge is finding what you want to read, Craig underscored. The democratization of media not only brings more “good stuff,” but more “bad stuff” as well, he noted.

Craig sees parallels between today’s “truth to power” blogging world and the time of Tom Paine’s “common sense,” citing Daily Kos and Instapundit as modern day successors.

Organized religion also is an effective form of social media, serving to bring people together for shared experiences in communal settings, Craig suggested.

Craiglsist, of course, is driven by the notion of community. I asked Craig though how the desire of some to use “assumed identities” within his community may impact the overall community experience.

That is where Craig’s primary role of ”Customer Service Representative” at Craiglist comes into play. Craig told me that while the overall percentage of people engaging in “bad” behaviour at Craiglsist is “small,” it nevertheless represents a big “headache” for him, and he seeks to mitigate as necessary.

How committed is Craig to “serving customers” at Craiglist? He shared at the Social Media Club last week that he is dedicated to serving as Craigslist “Customer Service Representative” forever, literally.

Craig’s stance on Craiglsist? For Craig, “the exit strategy is death.”

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN