I had a nice telephone call with Faith over at Oodle and she gave me the run down on the new release of their site.

Sounds like they have done a lot of research and focus groups before they started the redesign.

They have a new, and very cool, area called Oodle Insight that let the renter know if the house they are looking at it above or below market value.

I am amazed how many new listings a day they get - 500K a day!

Oodle.com raised $11 million in funding - but why?

I gotta think that they have a nice positive cash flow going with the contextual ads they serve.

My guess is they want to buy another site to make them bigger.

Or perhaps use that money to pay Craigslist to allow Oodle to spider Craigslist again.

For those that are not familiar with Oodle.com, I thought I would describe how it works and how it affects the online rental market.

Basically Oodle scrapes other sites. What that means is they have automated spiders that go out and scrape the content from other sites like RentClicks, RentalHouses, my site, as well as free sites and then displays snippets of the rental properties on Oodle’s city listing page. When a visitor to Oodle finds a listing they like from Oodle, they get re-directed from Oodle’s site to a site such as RentClicks.

Correction: I have been informed from a RentClicks representative that RentClicks and RentalHouses is not being scraped, they are providing an XML feed directly to Oodle.

This can cause some issues because Oodle is basically making money off of other sites content and this can cause a love hate relationship with Oodle. I say love hate because a site like RentClicks probably loves the free referral traffic Oodle sends its way, but hates that someone is capitalizing off their content.

Another part of the hate relationship is bandwidth. For Oodle to provide visitors with the best user experience they need to spider a rental listing over and over again all day long to make sure if it has changed, if it has then Oodle need to update their snippet - such as the price of the rental. This aggressive spidering cost money to the rental site like RentClicks in terms of bandwidth.

Oodle makes it’s money from contextual advertising on their site similar how a rental site like HotPads makes their money.

Another question to ask is it really their (RentClicks example) content because all the information on a site like RentClicks or my site is generated from users and not from a company like mine. Of course the person placing the ad does not care who scraps their content because they want all the exposure they can get.

From a visitor’s perspective Oodle provides a very nice user experience because the visitor to Oodle can basically find all the listings in one place. This brings up the hate part of the relationship because sites like RentClicks lose out on traffic through their site where people might have clicked on banner ads on other pages before getting to the actual listing page.

Some sites do not allow Oodle to scrap their content, they block Oodle’s spiders so they can not take its content. Craigslist is one of them. Craigslist doesn’t make money from contextual advertising so Craigslist doesn’t have anything to gain from the extra traffic. Also Craigslist didn’t want to lose it’s branding image - people where asking Craigslist why their ads appeared in other places which confused their branding.

On a side note: my site is not yet currently scrapped by Oodle, I believe I have to opt-in or I just don’t have enough listings yet and they don’t care about me.

Another neat thing you can do is keep score on Oodle. To see who has the most listings just go to Oodle and type in the site you want to track in to the keyword field:

• RentalHouses 19,719
• RentClicks 12,946
• HomeRentalAds 1,086
• RentalHomesPlus 997

Correction: I have been informed from a RentClicks representative that they have 29,000 listings (wow, that’s a lot!) and RentalHouses has about 12,000. So it appears that the Oodle stats are off, which makes sense since there can be many duplicates coming from different sources.

Correction #2: I have been also informed from a RentalHomesPlus representative that they have “have significantly higher number than that” (more than the 997 shown).
RentMarketer is basically the opposite of Oodle. In a upcoming post I will cover how the RentMarketer business model works.

What are your thoughts on Oodle? Do you love it or hate it?

[tags]Oodle, scrapping sites[/tags]