Putting Ads On Others' Ads

from the this-is-going-to-get-complicated... dept

A few different sites today are talking about a new service, called Oodle, that lets people do a meta-search for classifieds in specific locations. In other words, you choose the city you live in (they don't offer many yet), and you do a search for "bicycle" and you'll get ads from Craigslist, eBay, the local newspaper and others. It's an interesting idea, but some are wondering about the legality of it. The business model of the company is to put contextual ads along side the results. Deep linking to stories has been shown to be legal (in most places...), but does it get more complicated when you're deeplinking into ads? The obvious answer is that it shouldn't matter at all. Services like this one drive more traffic to the ads, which should make everyone happy. Either way, what's most interesting about this development is that it's, yet another example of how people want advertising that's relevant to them and which they have control over. Classified ads are ads after all. So, is there really a business model in placing contextual, machine generated ads next to ads that people are specifically searching for? It seems like a stretch.

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