Groupon’s whopping VC funding that, at last count, values the company at $1.35 billion, validates the power of hyperlocal couponing as a form of pull advertising media (pull advertising defined as a vehicle where the consumer actively monitors deals as opposed to passively receiving commercial messages like TV ads). Consumers follow Groupon by various social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, RSS, or their website – and monitor daily local deals for ones they like and want to buy.
The big opportunity to imitate and replicate the Groupon model is on. Techcrunch listed the imitators:
- Groopswoop (SF)
- SocialBuy (SF, LA, San Diego, San Jose, Las Vegas, Phx, Portland, Seattle, Chicago)
- ScoopSt (NYC, uses email lists)
- LivingSocial (various cities)
- BuywithMe (Boston, NYC, San Diego, DC)
- Swoopoff (LA)
- CityDeal (Germany)
- MyDailyThread (Atlanta)
- Wowcher (UK)
Note that the new constellation of “Groupons” is at startup stage and fragmented across geographies, each targeting a stake in one or a series of cities. At this nascent stage, only the metro areas are being covered by the Groupons for scalability. However, it’s easy to see that the hyperlocal couponing model can extend granularly down to the towns, suburbs and rural areas just as easily.
As the Breaking News Network builds out across cities and towns in America, we see opportunities to partner with the couponing ventures to reach local business. Our first step is to aggregate all of the daily deals offered by the Groupons for each city and share them through each city site. Here’s an example of these Daily Deals in BreakingSFNews.com:
Follow us to watch our next steps in developing a localized Groupon model across the Breaking News Network.
[...] to the growing buzz of local couponers Groupon and its cohorts, consumers are being exposed to and adopting the deep discount coupon opportunities in their [...]
[...] landscape of online local advertising has been changing dramatically since Groupon announced its powerhouse VC investment less than three months ago in April. Groupon and its gaggle of imitator couponing systems have forced traditional media to re-examine [...]
[...] exploded the first half of 2010, driven in part by Groupon’s big VC investment. Coupons.com reported almost double the revenues from the first half of 2010 over previous year. [...]