Until now, using Zenlist meant adding a complete classified ads section to your website or blog. You create a new blank page from your template, add a few lines of javascript, and voilà you have a stand-alone classified ads section that you can link to from your main navigation. 

But part of our effort to "re-democratize classifieds" involves helping anyone with a website or blog participate in this $100 billion worldwide market – even websites that don't want or need a complete, stand-alone classifieds section. Our new Banner Block format goes a long way toward this goal.

With Zenlist Banner Blocks, if your website already has space dedicated for display advertising, you can easily run Zenlistings. A Banner Block is an easy-to-install widget that displays classified listings relevant to your site's content, and lets your users post their own listings directly to your website and to the network. The first Banner Block we're releasing is an IAB-standard medium rectangle: 300x250 pixels. Here's how it looks:

And you can see a live example here.

The Banner Block displays several pages of four listings each that users can scroll through. In addition, users can browse categories, reply to listings, as well as post and manage their listings directly via the Banner Block. All interactions occur in a pop-up modal window, so the user never leaves the page they're on. And just as with our classic layout, we share a full 50% of revenue generated with you. When your users buy featured listing upgrades, you make real dollars – not just a few cents per click. 

And since classifieds are largely ads posted by individuals rather than by companies, there is a social aspect to classifieds that does not exist with traditional banner advertising. Sites that run Zenlistings are helping facilitate connections and transactions between their users, just as forums, commenting systems, and social networks do. Where banner ads tend to annoy users, classifieds engage.  

We believe that Zenlistings are the most compelling, engaging, and lucrative kind of advertising you can run on your website. But don't take our word for it. Sign up for Zenlist and try it out on your site.  

Since our beta release, we've been working hard to refine Zenlist so that it works optimally for website publishers and their end users. If you'd like to see how our stand-alone classified listings section works, have a look at a few of the websites using Zenlist:

Franglo
Franglo is our in-house brand focusing on the expat/travel vertical. There are localized Franglo sites for most countries. 

Expatica 
Expatica is using Zenlist to power their classified listing for all of their regional news and information sites, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Moscow.  

Bonjour Paris
Bonjour Paris is the guide to Paris and France from the top insiders in Paris.

Lost in France
Lost in France is a web-based guide to France. 

We're also about to release our first IAB-standard ad unit sized widget (a 300x250 pixel rectangle). This will make it easy for any website that is already running banners to easily run Zenlistings in their ad inventory. Stay tuned...

We just sent out the first batch of invites for Zenlist Publisher, so it's official: We're in beta.

As far as we know, Zenlist is the first embeddable classifieds system. Once you've signed into Zenlist Publisher, you can configure a classifieds section and add it to your website in a matter of minutes. It's as easy as making a few choices about topics, categories and geolocation, then pasting a few lines of code into your website. 

But Zenlist is also a content network, so your new classifieds section comes out of the box full of listings—content that is relevant to the focus and users of your site. 

So Zenlist provides websites with relevant user-generated content and facilitates social connections, both real and virtual. But Zenlist also gives website publishers a new revenue stream. Whenever a user pays to upgrade their listing, we share those fees with the publisher. So that’s why we say that Zenlist is like Google ads meets Craigslist: It lets everyone add relevant social classified listings to their websites, and earn money. 

We also say that Zenlist is "classifieds, reinvented" because we believe that Zenlist can help re-democratize what has become a business controlled by a few large companies. Classifieds used to be found everywhere—from newspapers and magazines, to lampposts and Laundromats. Then, about 15 years ago Craigslist popped up. Later, eBay and others threw their hats into the ring. Today, classifieds have been centralized in a handful of online services. 

Starting now, Zenlist lets anyone with a website offer their users a virtual lamppost to post listings to buy, sell, connect, and transact with other people with common interests.

It’s free. It’s easy. Everybody wins. 

Please have a look at the new Zenlist marketing site, and get in touch with us if you're interested in being added to the list of beta users. 

More updates soon.