Web link to Wal-Mart is news to paper
Posted on Wednesday, June 4, 2008
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Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has launched a link to online classified advertisements that enhances the local shopping experience for its Internet shoppers, according to information from its Wal-Mart. com Web site.
The link “classifieds” appeared on the world’s largest retailer’s Web site during the last week of May in what has been described by the Bentonville-based retailer as a test program. It takes visitors to lists of advertisements that can be searched according to location, product or service offered.
But when viewers clicked on some of the advertisements posted on the Wal-Mart site, they — and Arkansas Democrat-Gazette management — were surprised to be redirected to the newspaper’s online classified advertisements.
Wal-Mart hopes the classifieds program will provide more opportunities for customers to save money and live better, Ravi Jariwala, Wal-mart. com spokesman, said in an e-mail Tuesday.
The classifieds link offers an expanded list of products and services not traditionally available from Wal-Mart like job listings, automobiles, rentals and other real estate, Jariwala said in the e-mail.
The program is a partnership with the online adverting company Oodle. com, founded by a group of eBay and Excite former executives in San Mateo, Calif., three years ago, according to the company’s Web site.
The test program links viewers to classified advertisements posted on the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette’s Web site, Arkansasonline. com.
Paul R. Smith, president of WEHCO Newspapers, Inc., a private company that publishes the Democrat-Gazette, Arkansas ’ largest newspaper, said neither Wal-Mart nor Oodle has prior permission to use the ads.
“We are not sure how we’re going to handle this,” Smith said Tuesday.
Wal-Mart spokesman Phillip Keene said Oodle uses a standard programming protocol to seek permission rights for searches and indexing of advertisements. If a Web site does not provide permission to make its content available to other sites, it will not be added to Oodle’s index, Keene said.
According to Keene, the protocol settings on the Democrat-Gazette’s Web site grant permission for the ads’ use on other sites.
“I don’t think that is necessarily true,” Smith said. “We haven’t given anyone permission to lift information from our site and move it to their site.”
Oodle. com Chief Executive Officer Craig Donato said the protocol grants access not only to advertising sites like his but to search engines such as Yahoo and Google. “It is simply linking our site to theirs. We’re not grabbing content. It is just directing more traffic to the site and its advertisers,” Donato said. “If it didn’t take them to our Web site, we absolutely would not allow it,” Smith said. Smith said the paper’s administration would consider the issue over the next few days before deciding whether to stop Wal-Mart’s link. “This is going to be around for a while; it is not something that has to be decided today. Until we decide, we will allow the links. Once we decide what to do, we will notify them of our decision,” Smith said.
To contact this reporter: sroberts@arkansasonline. com
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