It's been years now since Craigslist has effectively been operating without any real competitors, given that newspaper classified sales have continued to take a steady nosedive. That may all change though, with Wal-Mart's annoucement today that it's jumping into the free classifieds business. The Financial Times reports that they've teamed up with Oodle.com, a start-up based in San Mateo, on the new site. Oodle partners with around 80,000 different sites, which include online newspaper classifieds, web commerce, and auctioneers. While Oodle has been toiling alone with some success, now that it's got the heft of Wal-Mart's name (and dollars) behind it, could it have a real shot at snagging part of Craigslist's market share?
What do you guys think? Is the Wal-Mart name and budget enough to help Oodle unseat Craigslist?
(p.s. And what do you think of usability and looks of the Wal-Mart site? Craigslist is no peach when it comes to aesthetics, but the Wal-Mart site seems wonky. Thoughts?)
ADDENDUM: One additional thought occured to me after posting the last blog. Given that Wal-Mart is known for its conservative, feel-good values, could they ever really compete with Craigslist's dating/chance meetings/whatever advertisments? Accepting those sorts of advertisements would mean that Wal-Mart would have to loosen up a lot, and that it'd have to sacrifice at least some of its squeaky clean image. I don't see them going there.
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Oodle.com now has one less potential person visiting their site. As long as the evil doers known as Wal-mart are backing them, I never will.
—leahwinger2
12:58, June 4th, 2008
Hey, Wal-Mart can be player in this space. Some people hold it in quite a high regard.
—richard
18:29, June 3rd, 2008
Walmart has been carrying slightly sanitized content for years without compromising its integrity, I see no reason for that to stop now. Take this post from walmart.oodle.com/discrete: "Home alone for the weekend. Looking for a _____ ____ ________ to _______ ______ my ______ ________ while ______________. ________ only." I think that gets the point across just fine.
—benpirie
18:16, June 3rd, 2008
Walmart needs to stick to what they know best. Let the other companies do their thing. Don't they make enough money? Craiglist is great workable site that is user friendly, ANYONE can post something. There is always going to be the good with the bad, that is just the way that it is.
—Netrentatoy
17:39, June 3rd, 2008
Let's face it Best-of-Wal-Mart just doesn't have the same ring. Take for example the posting entitled "To the cute microbiologist who's gonna examine my stool - w4m." Will this have appeal to the conservative mom's buying back to school Mary Kate and Ashley wear?
—brentbutler
17:19, June 3rd, 2008
I hate to say it, but they've got an edge in the search filters. There's an appeal to CL's austere look, but I've always had difficulty searching for specifics (utilities included, automatic transmission, sagittarius, etc.) without trying frustrating combinations of search terms. If Walmart can establish a clear edge in ease of use, I wouldn't be surprised to see them compete.
—benpirie
17:19, June 3rd, 2008
CL is too "open" to be unseat by anyone with a profit motive. As soon as CL loses its free-for-all design and access... it moves into the RIP column.
—bryanh
16:54, June 3rd, 2008
Walmart's site looks like a placeholder website. The kind of site that you'd land on if you were researching domain names to buy and came across one like this...http://logofame.com/ or this http://webtrafficcontrol.com/. Jerks.
—matteo
16:54, June 3rd, 2008
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