Oodle a vertical search engine for classified ads, is set to add events as a category in the next week or so. Oodle’s current categories include For Sale, Cars, Housing, Jobs and Services. With events, they will have the ability to pair revenue-generating services such as ticket sales and related items with the classifieds.
Oodle clearly needs to find new ways to generate excitement. Traffic is flattish and they recently lost the feed from Craigslist, an important source of classified ads. Oodle is all about decentralized content, a theme I constantly talk about, and I’m in their corner. I hope they find a way to make their model work.
As far as I can tell, Oodle is not really all about decentralized content. What they are is metasearch - which is searching multiple centralized sources of content. I can’t recall a single metasearch site that has had any real success.
I’m sure Oodle is dreaming of the day when structured blogging / microformats is ubiquitous. =)
Interesting aggregator - interesting model, to be a parallel channel but not a competitor… makes for a slightly weird user experience that one has to go elsewhere to post.
Michael, have you shot past BlockRocker?
Ajax version (launch forthcoming, testing at present): http://www.blockrocker.com/search2.php
Current version:
http://www.blockrocker.com/
Disclaimer: I am president of WhizSpark, an event marketing and registration service. End disclaimer.
Events is a natural extension for a company with classified/shopping aggregation technology. Events are content that people want to be able to search and find. And it is also content that [most] producers have a financial incentive to make findable.
Right now, however, the only ESTABLISHED way to make cash as an affiliate from events is to go after the secondary ticket market. (Which is a healthy market.)
Fatlens is working on getting primary ticketing companies to open APIs and add affiliate programs. But, this is an uphill battle. First, they have to educate them. I was talking to a mid sized ticketing company’s director of sales the other day, and I had to explain what an API was. It also took him 2 hours of conversation to understand how affiliate advertising works OR could work for events.
From a search/find perspective, noone has cracked the nut yet. The problem is aggregation. Noone has aggregated enough events to create a compelling reason for a searcher to return.
Structured blogging might help if it is adopted by enough bloggers and hosted blogging platforms (Xanga, typepad, blogger, myspace, etc). (The latter being more important in my opinion.)
Adding RSS to evite would solve the issue overnight. Or adding RSS and an affiliate program to ticketmaster might solve the same issue. But that’s a whole other story. As everyone knows, both of those companies are owned by IAC, along with a host of other smaller ticketing and travel services companies.
The way IAC/Ticketmaster competes is by strength. They finance the concert promotion industry by outlaying cash to promoters to book talent, lock up venues with box office management services, and provide kickbacks to promoters and venues alike through their exorbitant “fees” to consumers. They are the only place a consumer can buy tickets for big name acts at the biggest venues. So, like most monopolies, they don’t need affiliates. The interesting part is that the majority of shows that go through ticketmaster are not sold out. (that’s a pdf) Therein, certainly lies an opportunity.
Evite has a different reason for not adding RSS. They monetize through eyeballs. If someone were to build a better search engine for searching events, they’d lose out on a lot of eyeballs and CPM revenue.
So, I’d argue that a compelling search engine for events isn’t going to happen anytime soon. Given the financial incentives in the industry to NOT let “data” go, most event listing data repositories will not let go of their data. And there won’t be any significant movement in the primary ticketing industry anytime soon.
Nonetheless, I am loving that everyone is putting a lot of effort into making events more findable. From yahoo/upcoming to trumba to zvents and eventful, there is a crapload of activity around making the process of finding events for consumers - a much easier process. And there are plenty of opportunities at the edges of the event registration and ticketing industry that will be willing to share in the revenue with affiliates.
If anyone wants to talk to me further about this, I can be reached at pcaputa at whizspark dot com. I’ve been breathing this stuff for awhile now. And would enjoy conversations with anyone that is tackling the same issues.
hi michael,
fwiw, oodle traffic has been growing at a very good clip (over 25% last month). i think alexa data is a little misleading in two regards. first, it appears to heavily skew towards a bay area demographic. we track data per location (given that’s how our sites are layed out) and we’ve noticed a pretty tight correlation. it also appears to be more more heavily weighted to industry insiders (highly correlated to pr and blog traffic). not sure if anyone else has seen this…
thanks for the support,
craig
Craig, good clarification. Alexa is notoriously bad but it’s usually all we have.
schalom!