Loot (magazine)

Loot is one of the United Kingdom's leading free classified advertising publishers, distributing its products via print, internet, interactive television and Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Loot was founded in 1984 when David Landau, an Oxford don and an art historian, picked up a magazine titled Secondamano ("second-hand") in a Milan airport, believing it to be an antiques magazine. Finding out it was a free classifieds magazine instead, he was intrigued by the concept and discovered that no similar publication existed in the UK at that time. Together with his sister Elizabeth (who came up with the name Loot for the new venture) and her husband Dominic Gill, then music critic for the Financial Times, the trio raised the money to launch their first publication, the London edition of Loot, in 1985.

The paper was launched as a means "to buy, sell or exchange absolutely anything", and published every Thursday containing only 16 pages of ads. At one point, Loot's free-ads publication was published in 20 editions per week across the UK with a weekly circulation of approximately 180,000 copies. As of February 2012, Loot is published thrice weekly in London and Manchester and weekly in Liverpool; two specialist papers, Loot Recruit and Jobs Week are also published weekly in the London area, and Bargain Pages in the West Midlands. Its website, Loot.com, generates approximately 24 million monthly page impressions and had 557,000 unique users, based on a March 2009 ABC audit.

Loot was bought in June 2000 by Scoot.com but the company was forced to sell the publication at a heavy loss just 14 months later to Daily Mail and General Trust and Loot became a division of Associated New Ventures, featuring private and business advertisements in over 600 classifications. In 2010 it was bought from DMGT by Printing Investments Ltd, reuniting the publication with Buy&Sell, an Irish classifieds magazine previously owned by Loot.