Tippr Launches Affiliate Network: ‘AdSense for Deals’

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Group-buying service Tippr has announced the launch of an affiliate network program this morning to supplement the company’s featured white-label product. Publishers who use Powered by Tippr software to host daily deals will be able to syndicate these offers across a network of affiliate sites —  including major aggregators like Yipit and Yahoo Deals as well as over 1,000 hyperlocal and vertical niche publications.

These deals will appear on the affiliate site as a widget or embedded image which, when clicked, will drive visitors to the native publication, where they can purchase the voucher. The company says that Tippr clients will net 10%-15% of additional sales from vouchers sold through the affiliate network, and that the program will serve as an additional customer-acquisition tool.

“The bottom line is that, even for a large provider like Groupon, your average consumer spends 99.9 percent of their time on a site other than Groupon.com,” Tippr CEO Martin Tobias told Street Fight. “The only way to succeed in the deals business is to have leverage in distribution, and we believe that the best way to do that is through an affiliate network.”

The value for affiliates, says Tobias, is as a needed alternative to Google AdSense. “Deals are a much more relevant monetization of pageviews than banner ads,” he explains. “It’s really content and commerce together. By promoting deals which relate to your vertical or geography, we are seeing click-through-rates increasing by twenty to thirty present.”

For hyperlocal media sites looking to expand their revenue stream without a major structural investment, Tippr’s affiliate network offers a fairly viable entrant into the deals space. New-York based NearSay launched a similar network for their advertorial marketing solution LocalVox in August, and has made a business out of blurring the line between editorial and advertising.

Tippr is one of a growing number of companies committed to a white-label/publisher-based approach to the deals space – the argument for which was laid out by Second Street CEO Matt Cohen in a recent article on Street Fight. A major issue facing these white-label providers is that the technology and supporting structures are built entirely around the daily deal — a format for offers that has been criticized as unsustainable and problematic for merchants. With local and instant deals coming into vogue as merchants look to hit nearby consumers with lower-margin, more sustainable offers on their mobile devices, white-labelers need to quickly adapt.

“There will be an additional announcement soon,” Tobias explained to Street Fight when asked about the movement towards local deals. “What you will see us doing is saying that we want our deals from our publishers in whatever application consumers are using — not necessarily our mobile app or mobile apps owned by the publishers.”

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