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February 23, 2009

Oodle's AOL Deal Boosts Network Scale

Oodle's network just keeps on growing. The firm's latest score is AOL, where it will be feeding listings in some categories into AOL's new classifieds service.

AOL already offers autos, jobs, real estate, and personals, so to start, Oodle is filling out sections like merchandise and pets. In the future, Oodle listings will appear in other categories, according to Oodle CEO Craig Donato, who called the AOL partnership a "big addition" to the network, which he told me sees around 500,000 new listings each day -- about 40 million active listings at any one time.

Donato told me the main focus for Oodle has been to achieve scale. "We have been very, very focused on achieving scale.... We're getting there," he said.

New to AOL through Oodle is the ability for users to post free listings in categories including merch, services, and vehicles.

The standard classifieds categories -- cars, real estate, jobs -- typically attract users only when they're in the market for those things. Donato stressed the importance of sites like AOL taking the "portfolio" approach by offering those and categories that drive more habitual behavior. Merchandise does that. (Hey, anyone with saved searches on eBay knows this).

As classifieds services online have become more popular, they've grown more vulnerable to spam, said Donato, who said his firm has been battling the classifieds spam epidemic through various filters and algorithms for nearly two years.

Next up for Oodle is implementation of Facebook classifieds, "soon," according to Donato.

Posted by Kate Kaye at February 23, 2009 5:31 PM

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