If you are a major aggregator of daily deals and the industry seems to be slowing down, what do you do next? That’s the question faced by 8coupons, one of the original aggregators. As founder Landy Ung tells us, “we used to get literally an email a day from a daily deal” site seeking a partnership. “Now it is one a week.”

It may have seemed safe for 8coupons, in fact, to continue building as it was. The self-funded site has been profitable for over a year, and has already set up partnerships with 450 daily deal companies and 50 local “non-daily deal companies, such as Goldstar and Restaurant.com. “Each one is unique,” says Ung. It also provides offers from 4,000 other sources.

The site has also avoided being boycotted by major sites such as Groupon and LivingSocial, which generally won’t work with aggregators. 8coupons makes the grade because it includes a variety of content beyond simply listing deals, including deal validation (“Is this deal for real?”) local shopper blogs and maps.

But six months ago, Ung says, the company had a nasty wakeup call when Google changed its algorithms. “We had been riding Google for the last couple of years, but we lost half of our traffic” (and much of its Google-based advertising revenues).

Ung decided the site had to go in some radically different directions, focusing on letting its 2.5 million unique visitors discover services and products. “Now we want to own the lifecycle” of how consumers use deals and offers, she says. “We are more of a service experience,” with a newsletter and other features,” adds Ung. “Even if the deals space collapses today, there is still a need for us.”

The emphasis on discovery has led to the ramping up in importance of such partners as Goldstar, the cultural events site, which is now its third-largest provider of leads after Groupon and LivingSocial.

One step it took was to partner with CityPockets, which tracks deals for consumers. Another step was to ditch the self-serve platform in favor of a deal with SignPost, the social media deal site that allows businesses to create their own coupons. SignPost had been a direct competitor, notes Ung. But “they’ve evolved into a B2B platform. They’ve phased out consumers at a time when we were phasing out B2B.”

8coupons is also de-emphasizing its efforts to aggregate shopping-related content. Instead, the company focuses on local “experiential” deals. “Getting local, shopping related content is extremely, extremely hard,” says Ung. We still have 50 bloggers we work with, but just a handful of them are truly committed. And those tend to have their own affiliate relationships,” which presents an inevitable conflict.

Ung notes that since the relaunch, 8coupons’ direct traffic has been growing 30 percent week over week. “The new 8coupons has gone beyond an aggregation and distribution platform,” says Ung. “It has pulled together the entire local deals ecosystem into a single hub, and is now the only hub for discovering, buying, organizing and even creating daily deals.”

The post 8coupons Relaunches Amid Daily Deal Slowdown appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

LivingSocial created a stir when an e-mail circulated from the group buying site informing deal-a-day aggregators that they would be dropped as affiliates. However, as 8coupons cofounder Landy Ung and The Dealmap CEO Jennifer Dulski reminded the ILM:10 audience last month, not all aggregators are created equal. As such, they are not all being treated equally by LivingSocial.

Pure daily deal aggregators — those featuring “a collection of daily deals as its primary content” (via the e-mail) — will be excluded. These include Yipit and Dealsurf, as reported. Others, including 8coupons and The Dealmap, will continue as active LivingSocial affiliates, taking a share of revenues for referring customers. Both companies serve an array of offers beyond just daily deals, meaning less head butting with destination sites.

There are several plausible reasons for why LivingSocial would selectively pull the plug. While Dulski and Ung stressed at ILM that aggregators play a complementary, and not a competitive, role in the larger deals ecosystem, those that barter singularly in DOD could pose a threat. As pure-play aggregators build their e-mail lists, some subscribers may be tempted to abandon the swarm of destination sites and simply hook on with an offer network. In those cases, 8coupons’ Matt Moskowitz told BIA/Kelsey that “LivingSocial doesn’t want to subsidize their entire business model.”

Also, some aggregators bid for and buy Google AdWords and other SEM campaigns for LivingSocial keywords. Essentially, Moskowitz said, they are “making money from LivingSocial, then reinvesting it to compete with them.”

With new deal-a-day sites surfacing constantly (several hundred now) and more white-label providers recruiting publishers to “get in the game,” the noise level will only rise. As a result, the role of the aggregator becomes more pronounced. For second tier and niche sites, having access to an aggregator’s network is crucial. For top dogs such as Groupon and LivingSocial, the competitive tension heightens.

The post Getting to the Bottom of LivingSocial’s Aggregator Snub appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

The post Group-Based ‘Deals of the Day’ Sites: 55 and Counting appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Groupon has a roaring head start in the deals of the day category for groups, with more than a million users. We’ll hear all about Groupon from CEO Andrew Mason at next week’s Marketplaces conference in San Diego, where he is keynoting. But there are now countless imitators adding their own deals.

New York-based 8Coupons.com, which aggregates coupons from content partners such as Valpak, Money Mailer and RedPlum’s SuperCoups, has now put them all together in one spot (great idea). 8Coupons launched the top 10 U.S. cities last month, and now has 55 different Group Buying “Deals of the Day” Web sites in 100 cities. Based on what we are hearing around the industry, many more sites are likely to enter the space soon.

The post Group-Based 'Deals of the Day' Sites: 55 and Counting appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.