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New on the classifieds scene: Wal-mart! News surfaced in recent days that the giant retailer has added Wal-mart Classifieds to its website, which has an enviable 26 million unique visitors a month. It’s powered by Oodle, the Silicon Valley classifieds technology and aggregation company, and features classified ads — filtered locally — from the Oodle network of participating classifieds sites (which, BTW, still does not include Craigslist).
What’s that mean?
First, the Wal-mart official line. Here’s the extent of what Wal-mart’s PR person on the project was willing to offer:
“We recently launched Walmart.com Classifieds beta to provide additional opportunities for our customers to save money and live better. This free, community-based resource allows customers to buy and sell items locally, find local jobs and learn about events in their area. Our new Classifieds beta at Walmart.com provides an expanded offering of products and services, the majority of which are not traditionally available from Wal-Mart, such as job listings, automobiles, rentals and real estate. It also further connects our community of 130 million customers who shop the Wal-Mart brand each week.”
Wal-mart didn’t even issue a press release about this. (Huh?) Oodle CEO Craig Donato deferred comment about Wal-mart Classifieds to aforementioned I-can’t-tell-you-much PR person (oh, well), but Donato is clearly excited about the deal, since it has the potential to grow Oodle’s network traffic significantly.
Here are a few random thoughts about the significance of Wal-mart Classifieds:
- This continues a trend that I’ve been watching for a long time: non-media companies becoming media companies (in addition to their core business). Anyone can become a classifieds publisher now, with companies like Oodle providing the backbone and content; any company can latch on for the ride. Newspapers used to worry about TV stations getting into the classifieds game, and of course pure-play online classifieds companies. Now add retailers and who-knows-what-else as potential competitors.
- This further fragmentation of classifieds makes any single classifieds destination that much less powerful. The new power is when classifieds are leveraged across large networks of sites online. (Craigslist would be the exception to that, though I have to wonder how much longer it will be able to stay an island.)
- Still, I doubt that Wal-mart will impact Craigslist much in the short term; my hunch is that they have different customer bases that don’t overlap a lot. I can’t imagine Craigslist loyalists switching allegiances for Wal-mart Classifieds, because Craigslist benefits from serious customer loyalty.
- My partner in ReinventingClassifieds.com, Christopher Ryan, had this take on the Wal-mart news: “More players in the free-classified business means a more fragmented industry — which could well be a good thing for newspapers, since they could well become the biggest player in their local markets again.”
Ken Bilderback wrote,
The basic concept is an old one. Many stores have offered bulletin boards on which customers could pin free ads. This just puts the concept into hyperdrive.
Also, I wish I could believe that further market fragmentation will be good for newspapers, but I don’t see why more competition will hurt one competitor (craiglist) while helping another (papers.
Link | May 30th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Mick Gregory wrote,
I’m happy to see the newspaper industry is trying to come up with a strategy to evolve with the Web. It may be a decade late and a billion dollars short. Newspaper management remains editor-centric. There was no need to have real management in the cash cow phase, but that ended more than 10 years ago. Yet, editors with a distain for MBAs are still making the decisions.
Link | June 2nd, 2008 at 10:33 am
Kibbles ‘n Bits | Links for Today wrote,
[…] Steve Outing on Wal-Mart classifieds: “I doubt that Wal-mart will impact Craigslist much in the short term; my hunch is that they have different customer bases that don’t overlap a lot.: […]
Link | June 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 am
Mallory wrote,
Mick,
Editors are just journalists who deeply love what they do. They didn’t get into the newspaper game to make a huge salary. And they don’t stay in it for much more than their need to write. It’s not a job; it’s a life.
That said, I believe that passion is what fuels the success that brings viability to everything- not just newspapers. The MBAs who currently decide the fate of this field are in it to make money, period. The editors are in it to make money so ‘”it” still exists in three years, because they can’t imagine ever being in anything else.
Passion will create the ideas that will save the newspaper industry. And I don’t believe that anyone but true journalists have the fire to make that happen.
Link | July 3rd, 2008 at 4:33 am