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.
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Wow. 11 million. What will they do with it?
Some Guesses
1 ) Ramp up technical and sales staff to continue to work on the search algorithm and to continue to crawl as many classifieds sites as possible. They are up to 75,000 now.
For this type of search technology a staff of 100 would be about right. 50% technical and 50% Sales and Operations. On average a 50K Salary would be be 5,000,00 a year in salaries.
2) Aquire small feature rich sites that add value to their current service offerings. i.e. cell phone technology, etc,
Overall I think it is the human capital that they needed the “capital” for to ramp up as quickly as possible and then get gobbled up by a Yahoo, Google or MSN.
Prediction: Within 2 years will be acquired for over 100 million and will have annual earnings of 10 - 20 million. A purchase of 10xs earnings is very likely.
Personally, I think things don’t look bright for classified-ad sites that don’t have a good way to monetize the ultimate transaction that is advertised: http://stevemurch.typepad.com/blog/2007/03/the_coming_demi.html