The Washington Post's Express newspaper has chosen classifieds search-engine Oodle to power its new website for readers. Readexpress.com is designed to serve the 500,000 people who read the Express newspaper each day in the Washington D.C. metropolitan market. The new site offers frequently updated features and a variety of interactive tools including locally-oriented blogs, real-time polling and a classifieds marketplace. The site will also feature a dynamic map centered on local classifieds, and extensive restaurant and entertainment listings drawn from Express and washingtonpost.com.
Oodle serves up classified listings on Readexpress.com from its Oodle service, which aggregates listings from many online classifieds services. Oodle says it has over 15 million active listings from more than 55,000 sources in every major classifieds category: cars, real estate, apartments, jobs, merchandise, pets and tickets.
Oodle makes its money through advertising and referral revenue. It includes listings from eBay and is a member of eBay's affiliate program, which rewards affiliates for driving buyers to its site. Oodle CEO Craig Donato said the classifieds business model is being disrupted. He believes it is similar to when Internet advertising went from a pay-to-publish model to a pay-to-perform model.
Oodle is now working with a number of media partners to integrate its search capabilities into their local classifieds marketplaces using its application programming interface (API). Oodle most recently announced partnerships with Lycos and Backpage, a division of Village Voice Media.
http://express.oodle.com
Update 4/18/06: Express' daily audience in print is about 250,000. The weekly audience in print is 436,000.
