Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

What a local online classifieds coincidence!

I enjoyed breakfast this morning with Craig Donato, along with a hearty helping of “innovators dilemma” discussion about how the Web company he founded and leads–Oodle–is seizing a $30 billion market opportunity ripe for exploitation due to mass media incumbent inertia.

At the same time, the latest touted “online marketplace for local services” was making noise: GenieTown. The newly funded startup has been operational for many months, but is apparently now hailing an “official” launch. Founded and run by a Stanford PhD candidate, Hassan Chafi, the site’s raison d’etre reads like a computer scientist’s thesis proposal!

Although GenieTown sprung from Chafi’s humble need to “find someone to clean his apartment while working under stringent paper deadlines,” Chafi obtained his startup financing by proclaiming an esoteric sounding “local service lifecycle model.”

In GenieTown “Whitepaper” speak:

At the core of this model, is a customer-centric continuum that runs through a series of action phases, beginning with a customer’s intitial interest in a service, through the fulfillment of the service and the customer’s recommendation of the provider to others. For ease of reference, we name these action phases: Explore, Communicate, Transact and Manage. 

In GenieTown consumer facing marketing speak:

What is GenieTown? Chafi–who has declared himself Mayor of GenieTown–asks and answers: It is where “clever people connect to buy and sell local services.”

“People with skills, expertise, and passion in a wide range of areas use GenieTown to offer their services. These “Genies” build credibility and trust through answering questions from customers, submitting articles and giving competent advice. Through their contributions and jobs well done, Genies increase their ranking on GenieTown. GenieTown enables service markets to emerge and thrive by creating opportunities for people to express and demonstrate their abilities, ambitions and passions.”

Whether in feel-good marketing prose, or feel scientific engineering text, however, GenieTown is not delivering on its “clever” experience promise, and real world “genies” are not readily apparent. Browsing GenieTown’s “featured” listings surfaces an array of impersonal, canned, standard handyman sales pitches, and spam-like hawking of online ecommerce franchise properties. FOR EXAMPLE:

We are L’bel Paris 40 Years in the Direct Selling Industry selling fine french fragrances,skincare and cosmetics company. We are in 14 different countries and growing!
We are now expanding here in the United States.
We are looking for business minded individuals looking to start their own business selling cosmetics from our L’bel Paris catalog.
EXELLENT MONEY MAKETR! Make anywhere from 25%-50% commission.
We are Not a Mult-Level MARKETING COMPANY!
EXCELLENT OPPORTUNITY TO MEET PEOPLE
LOTS OF COMPANY SUPPORT! FREE TRAINING!
PLEASE CONTACT: AREA SALES MANAGER

How does one “Become a genie?”: “Join now, it’s quick and easy!”…AND free, and apparently anonymous and unverified!

How does a “Genie” get featured on the GenieTown home page? GenieTown advises one “Genie” called “Power Of Cash”  of GenieTown’s Stanford PhD advanced algorithm:

If you are wondering how to be displayed on the front page: the two genies featured are selected from our list of genies with portfolio pictures. To add portfolio pictures, log into your account, click on profile and scroll to the bottom of the page. This allows you to upload and organize your pictures.

GenieTown “Genie” “Power of Cash”’s profile:

Cash Leveraging Genious. I Help others receive Financial Glory..

You go, Mr. Power, thanks to GenieTown’s open (too open) platform! Despite all of GenieTown’s Stanford engineering credentials, the founding team has unleashed a supposedly local Web platform that is friendly to global, online spam.

Oodle has been striving to “improve the way people buy and sell locally” for several years, fueled by $19 million in venture capital backing. Oodle CEO Donato told me today that Oodle is on track to be cash-flow positive by the end of the year.

Both a destination site and a third-party distributor and aggregator, Oodle cites “30 million listings from over 80,000 classifieds sites,” except Craigslist. Donato believes that Oodle is nevertheless complementary to Craigslist, recommending that consumers use Craigslist, plus Oodle for breadth of reach.

Straddling both direct-to-consumer and link-to-classifieds sites approaches poses Oodle business model challenges, however. Last June, I asked Donato for his reaction to the eBay launch of Kijiji. SEE: Oodle CEO Q & A on eBay, Kijiji & Craigslist Classifieds

The Oodle CEO told me last year about Kijiji:

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 marketplaces, 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.

It is important to note now, though, that consumers ARE publishing listings directly into Oodle. How will the Oodle business model be impacted by the new, Oodle direct stance?

STAY TUNED TO INSIDER CHATTER FOR MORE: PART II ON OODLE COMING SOON!

MORE:  Yellow Pages Get Reprieve? The Myth of King Google Local Advertising ROI and
Local Advertising Online: SMEs Hold the Billion Dollar Keys, ILM ANALYSIS and
Google Beware: Facebook Takes Local Advertising Gloves Off, ILM REPORT and
Judy’s Book: What’s On Sale? WE ARE! Ten Reasons Why and
Spot Runner Sells For Rival Google: Local SEM Bandwagon Grows

ALSO: Craigslist Q & A: Classifieds Community NO ‘Walled Garden’ and Craigslist PR: Same OLD Media?

PLUS: Like.com to Entrepreneurs: It’s the Revenues, Stupid! and VideoEgg Rocks: Unveils AdFrames in Silicon Alley: Google Next?

CONTACT 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

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

Local is heating up. “Try our Yellow Pages on the Phone!” Jingle Networks shouts. And why not, it has a U.S. patent to back its business model up, the company announces today:

U.S. Patent 7,212,615 (Criteria Based Marketing for Telephone Directory Assistance) discloses the technique of examining the caller’s information request and targeting an advertisement to the consumer based on that specific request. Since its introduction, 1-800-FREE411 has provided advertisers and direct marketers with the opportunity to deliver targeted messages as callers are making a directory assistance request, creating a new advertising medium for reaching consumers in ready-to-buy mode.

Oodle CEO Craig Donato believes online classifieds are creating a lucrative new advertiisng medium for reaching consumers in ready to buy mode. In fact, the Web is but “one giant classified market” Donato told met when I spoke with him this week.

Oodle may have begun as a simple aggregator of classifieds listings when it launched two years ago. Today, though, Donato views his company mission as providing a “great shopping experience.”

“Any site can push listings,” Donato told me. Oodle “pushes” many, many classifieds, in fact: 75,000 sites are indexed to present more than 20 million lisitngs and “a couple of million people use the site each month,” Donato said.

For Oodle, the value ad is the personalized services it layers upon the Web’s aggregated classifieds.

Donato pegs the classifieds market at $30-$40 billion. Oodle recently received $11 milliion in additional VC funding to go after the opportunity, from existing investors Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures, as well as new investor JAFCO Ventures.

Oodle’s revenue model is to sell “featured listings” across Oodle and the Oodle Network, an array of third-party sites that use Oodle to power their online classifieds, such as the Washington Post and Local.com.

For Donato, the real value of Oodle is in how it “connects” users that want to “hunt for great deals,” via interactive, social tools such as “instant alerts” and anentertainment calendar:

Consumers can browse Oodle’s entertainment calendar to find something to do on a Friday night; use Oodle’s real-time pricing guides to determine the right price for a two-bedroom apartment in their neighborhood; and receive instant Oodle Alerts to jump on great deals the minute they become available.

Donato believes that by making the classifieds shopping expereience more personal and immediate, Oodle is well poised to become the go-to online classifieds destination.

CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN