AOL + Oodle = AOL Classifieds

Oodle as become the vendor/partner of choice it would appear for third parties seeking to add or beef up classifieds — a missed opportunity for eBay/Kijij. Today AOL launched a new classifieds site: Classifieds.AOL.com. There’s also a Canadian specific site at Classifieds.AOL.ca.

It’s all free of course. Here are interesting bits from the release:

Developed in partnership with Oodle, which operates the largest network of classifieds services in the U.S., buyers can easily find the best deals with access to more than 40 million listings aggregated from more than 80,000 different sites. In addition, AOL Classifieds links consumers directly to classifieds listings on other properties within the AOL network including AOL Autos, AOL Jobs, AOL Personals, and AOL Real Estate.

This new site becomes part of what the company is calling the “AOL Local Network,” which claims 54 million uniques. The lion’s share of that traffic is MapQuest.

For its part Oodle has 250 partners, including Facebook, Wal-Mart, MySpace, Comcast and now AOL, among others. These sites all are distribution outlets for Oodle listings, as well as new sources of content for the network.

And without Craigslist:

(I had initially used the “.com” URL for Craigslist so Compete under-represented its traffic. Now I’ve corrected. Thanks for the catch Jeremy.)

AOL, which doesn’t get enough credit these days for much of what it does, is developing interesting properties with third party content (e.g., When.com with Zvents). It’s also doing very interesting things with some of it other sites, such as MapQuest and Bebo.

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Update: Vast CEO Kevin Laws emailed me and said that the charts above are inaccurate. He says that most of Vast’s business is white label and shows up as traffic to the partner site. He also reminded me that Vast powers AOL autos.