Donato on Oodle and WaPo + Classified Shift to CPC + Social Classifieds?
Just got off the phone with Craig Donato, of Oodle. Damn. He's fun to talk to!

We went from clustering (one of my current obsessions, which he worked on at Excite) to the news paper industry's aggressive move into dailies, to the coming shift in classified's business model.

Here's pretty much how the conversation went:

Papers agressive with free dailies:
Young people aren't buying [as many] subscriptions. The industry's creating a new type of paper - free - that has a much younger readership and is widely distributed.

The context:
Washington Post's launching a new daily called Read Express, with online and print versions.

Oodle's big news:
Oodle will be powering the classified interface on the Read Express site, returning results from RE classifieds buyers, other Washington Post sites, and related local classified listing sites.

How the Washington Post gets paid:
Oodle pays the Post off of referral [and advertising] revenue generated on [classifieds section of the Express site] Post sites.

This will increasingly come in the form of performance-based revenues as the classifieds industry shifts.

Classifieds model shifting:
Pay for Publish (CPM) is becoming Pay for Lead (CPC... cost per conversion - still figuring out the appropriate conversions). Basic publishing will be free, but conversion-oriented performance-based upgrades will cost.

Donato foresees a short term price destruction in the classifieds market but long term category growth as the model matures.

Classifieds + social search?
The best way for this is community as spam filter, Community in classifieds [being applied today in the form of SPAM filtering], works better than community tagging, given the ephemeral nature of a classified listing.

Maybe some other interesting classified + social stuff coming from Oodle in this area... ;)

Cool stuff:
Read Express will be experimenting with blogs and MAPPING (one of my other obsessions)!

I had to be a dang jerk:
(me) why is oodle a better choice for Read Express than craigslist?
(Donato) We're entirely different - Oodle enables people to see all the listings in their environment.
(me) except for... Craigslist.
(Donato) ...right.

Post-interview questions I thought of:
• oodle and maps?
• oodle and mobile/sms (a possible performance metric w/call tracking or pay per call)?
• Read Express and mobile?
• oodle vs. Goole Base?

Thanks for a great interview Craig! [and thanks for the post-publishing edits, indicated by brackets and strike-throughs.]

Past oodle coverage:
Oodle Opens Up: 2 New Partnerships + API Coming
Oodle Partners with Lycos and Backpage
New Classifieds Search Engine Has Oodles of Potential

PR folks... curious about what Craig did right in his interview? Call me: 919-433-3139.
Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |