Recently the classifieds wars began heating up, as evidenced by Craigslist asking Oodle, a classifieds aggregator, to stop scraping its listings. Craigslist claimed that the incremental traffic received from Oodle was not worth the burden it placed on their servers. Craigslist has been growing rapidly in the past several years, more than doubling its market share of visits in the past year, as we reported in July. Hitwise data shows that Craigslist.org received 300 times greater market share of visits than Oodle.com for the week ending October 29, 2005.
Oodle.com has a similar site structure to Craigslist, in that it is broken out into city-based subdomains (i.e., atlanta.oodle.com, ny.oodle.com, etc). Currently Oodle Chicago receives the most visits, and is in closer competition with Craigslist Chicago. For the week ending October 29, 2005, Craigslist Chicago received 34 times greater market share of visits than Oodle Chicago. In contrast, Craigslist appears to have a greater foothold in New York, as New York Craigslist received 263 times greater market share of visits than Oodle New York.
In addition to much lower traffic levels, session times for Oodle are currently shorter than those for Craigslist. The average session times for Chicago and New York Craigslist were greater than 15 minutes for the week ending October 29, 2005, while Oodle New York’s average session time was 7 minutes 45 seconds, while Oodle Chicago’s session time was 5 minutes 29 seconds. Of course this can be expected since Oodle doesn’t offer the community-oriented content that Craigslist does, and you have to link off Oodle to read an ad.
The demographic differences between Oodle and Craigslist are also intriguing. According to Hitwise demographic data, Oodle receives a much higher portion of visits from females, at 69% for the four weeks ending October 22, 2005. Its visitors are also older than the typical Craigslist visitor, with 78% over age 35, while 50% of visitors to Craigslist are under age 35. The household income also varys significantly from Craigslist, as shown below. It seems that Oodle is attracting a typical newspaper reader, while Craigslist retains a strong foothold with the younger generation.