Facebook’s Life After Deals
The best or biggest deal, assertion, investment or other strategy this week. Who: Facebook What: Taking another approach to location-based services Just a week after it said it would abandon its location-based service Places in favor of a new strategy, Facebook announced that it was getting out of the deals business. Facebook Deals was only around […]
Bloomspot Leads an Industry Shift
Who: Bloomspot
What: $40 million in funding and a merchant guarantee
With all the chatter about Groupon’s updated IPO filings this week, and news that Patch is offering up daily deals in 800 (not a typo) hyperlocal markets, a couple of announcements from Bloomspot didn’t get as much attention as they otherwise might. The company said that it had scored a whopping $40 million in new funding, and revealed that it is using the data it collects to guarantee that deals they do will be profitable to vendors, or Bloomspot will cover the difference from its cut. There are a couple of important takeaways from all this news…
Why Niches Are Becoming More Important for Deals
In the month since Groupon’s S-1 filing, there has been a lot of criticism directed at the nascent daily deals industry. Some say that the deals model is unsustainable, while others claim that running a deal can cripple a small business. But before jumping on that bandwagon, it’s important to remember that online deals are still in their infancy…
Groupon to Go Public — And Then Where?
The point of the company that eventually became Groupon was initially to inspire group action around a political or social cause. It was called ThePoint.
The point of Groupon… well, that may yet to be determined. The company, which filed an S-1 today with the Securities & Exchange Commission for a $750 million initial public offering, is known as a group-buying firm offering deep discounts on everything from hair removal to horse rides, complete with clever copy in each offer. It has seen a meteoric rise in revenue, earning $644 million in the first quarter of 2011 alone, up from $713.3 million in all of 2010. It has 83 million subscribers across 43 countries. And, as CEO Andrew Mason revealed this week at AllThingsD’s D9 conference, about half of its 8,000 workforce is in sales. Groupon has some serious feet on the streets…
Partnership With Foursquare Is a Natural Step for Groupon
Earlier this week All Things Digital reported that Groupon and Foursquare were discussing a partnership to push local deals targeted to location-aware check-ins. The media world has been buzzing about the rumor, but neither company has broken an official silence to confirm (or deny) the partnership or discussions. Perhaps it’s just a foregone conclusion, though, that Groupon would add immediacy and social distribution to its model. In fact it already has…
Daily Deals by the Numbers
If you’re confused about the whos and whats of the daily deals filling your inbox, clarity has arrived in the form of a quick primer from the folks at Online MBA. They’ve put together a lovely, old-timey visualization illustrating what four of the big guys dealing the deals are actually offering.
Study: FB ‘Likes’ Driving Buzz for Local Biz
The Facebook “like” button, which has been around for just over a year, has already become an important cultural phenomenon. A couple of months ago, a study by Yahoo Labs’ Yury Lifshits looked at how “likes” affect traffic to news stories by reinforcing memes, making the most popular content even more popular as it is passed around.
Yipit’s Jim Moran: Lots of Winners in Hyperlocal
With so many daily deals sites popping up in the past year (following the mad success of Groupon), it’s natural that consumers would want a way to sift through, aggregate, and personalize these e-coupons to fit their needs. Enter Yipit, which launched in 2010 and draws on over 400 local deals sites (including Groupon, LivingSocial, and Scoop St.) to deliver customized lists of nearby deals...
Street Fight caught up with the company’s CEO, Jim Moran, for a quick Q&A about Yipit’s mission in the hyperlocal space, and whether the daily deals craze might be a “bubble.”..
Is the Local Deals Industry Heading for Segmentation?
Some companies are betting on a major specialization of the deals market. Signpost CEO Stuart Wall believes that the “stack” — a term used to describe the spectrum of companies in a single industry — is dividing into three major segments: distribution, exchanges, and merchant specialists…