Country Towns Editorial

Fear not the answer is out there! While Kijiji gives you exposure to millions of users and a clean easy to use interface, it's downfalls are many and some are becoming a big problem.

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Kijiji's claim to fame is in it ability to provide you local listings. Each City or location they chose to feature gets its own web site. You can do detailed searches within each of those sites. Unfortunately there is no link between each site, so if you where searching for something not found in your local site you have to go through each City's site one by one and perform the search.
This is actually not too bad because all you so is start on your local site, do your search, then just keep changing locations and it will automatically give you your search results for each place. Some users will take the time to do this, some won't bother. Where the problem comes in is with the sellers. They realize their item might be of interest to people outside their local area, or maybe they are in an area dead center between two locations. These sellers will put a copy of their ad on multiple location Kijijis.

This creates out of area ads, as well as duplication, two factors that users hate to see.

Spam can be a real headache on Kijiji. They try to keep on top of it, but its not easy. They rely mainly on user reports and can't justify extra staff to monitor free ads. Actual location isn't mandatory on Kijiji, leaving many ads stating the are in the main locale but are actually far away. It also means a search of a smaller community outside the location will no produce all ads actually placed from that area.

The newest feature, a top ad paid one, has really crowded out the results pages. Several paid ads top the listings, then google results wrap up the bottom of the list. They are blended to look close to the ads and can be irritating.

And then there's Oodle. Oodle is a whole new way of looking at free classified, some call it Web 3.0. Oodle combines free ads from over 200 major sites, such as MySpace and Facebook Marketplace, as well as individual ads from over 80,000 sellers submitted direct to Oodle. This compilation of ads can be easily viewed in one simple user friendly interface. You can search by your town and up to 250 km away, or you can view your whole region, or all of Canada or the USA and other countries.

But it doesn't stop there. Oodle then takes that same feed and provides it to webmasters. You can display your local ads right on your own website. Portal sites can easily provide local ad content.

Spam is way less on Oodle. The reason is it's not just Oodle and its users monitoring the ads, its over 200 web sites and their staff as well.

My money's on Oodle for the most successful free classified ad site in 2009!

Check it out!