Until recently, the European deal market was basically a year behind the U.S. But NimbleCommerce CEO Prashant Nedungadi argues that “they are beginning to catch up.” Nedungadi says they’ve graduated to more advanced platforms, and are more committed to driving revenues.

Some European newspaper publishers, for instance, are outpacing local Groupon and LivingSocial results. European consumers have also been proved to be quite similar to Americans in deal buying habits.

Nimble’s work with European local media publishers now accounts for 35 percent of its business. Nimble’s client roster includes the Sweetdeal sites for MeCom, the giant European media conglomerate with operations in the Netherlands, Denmark, Poland and Sweden. MeCom has 1.2 million subscribers and 40 paid titles. Nimble also has partnerships with four of the U.K.’s five top newspaper concerns: News International, The Guardian, Trinity Mirror and Johnson Newspapers.

In general, Nedungadi reports that Nimble is profitable, grossing $100 million worth of deals last year. He is projecting a gross of $250 million to $300 million for 2012 — a projection enhanced today by the announcement that Nimble will power the Digital First newspapers (formerly MediaNews Group and Journal-Register).

While there has been a big shakeout in the deals space, Nedungadi feels there is still new opportunity in the space. Deals are “a really important platform,” alongside coupons and other advertising, he emphasizes.

One opportunity is for smaller sites to verticalize, in part by doing deals with larger publishers. The challenge is “to get publishers to work with each other. The platform has to evolve into a network,” he says. A second opportunity is to more effectively target email addresses.

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In the context of Google’s reported $6 billion acquisition offer to Groupon, questions were raised at ILM:10 about the true potential of deal a day beyond its current two or three daily deals and banner ad e-mails. For Nimble Commerce CEO Prashant Nedungadi, the real potential is moving local advertising into performance-based models.

“Group buying is just one model,” said Nedungadi. “There are lots of interesting kinds of models. We haven’t event gotten into search, or Yellow Pages. Imagine if it was part of the search experience. That’s what we’re excited about.”

Ultimately, Nedungadi added, “we want to establish a strong relationship with consumers. At the end of the day, it is an e-commerce platform.”

Later, during another segment of The Deal a Day SuperForum, 8Coupons.com cofounder Landy Ung suggested another model is to provide featured listings. The site currently lists 1,000 deals a day. Some of the deal-a-day sites are providing aggregators like 8coupons commissions of 10 percent to 35 percent. In that context, the real value lies in having offers discovered. They’ll pay more to be a featured listing on the top of curated categories, said Ung. “Our partners are asking us to optimize at the top. It is a whole new business model we haven’t tapped into.”

During the same session, The Dealmap‘s Jennifer Dulski noted there may be additional opportunities with mobile e-commerce. Fifty percent of The Dealmap’s usage is currently mobile, although only 4 percent of deals providers currently have mobile capabilities. That is bound to grow quickly, said Dulski, but more work needs to be done to ensure smooth transaction capabilities for not only online apps, but also offline goods.

“The mobile transaction flow is very, very clunky,” said Dulski. The goal is to get to one click. The problem is that “Apple won’t use in app for anything other than virtual good. I predict they’ll change that within a year.”

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