The San Diego Union-Tribune is buying DiscoverSD. com, a lifestyle website founded in 2006. The acquisition, in the works for six months, was made with an eye toward expanding the UT’s fast growing Daily Deal business arm, which is expected to generate $10 million this year in new revenues.

The merger of the two databases will give the company’s separate deals programs a reach of 230,000 people. The UT has migrated to its own deals platform after originally working with Shoutback. DiscoverSD will also be using the UT platform.

Besides deals, The UT and DiscoverSD will seek synergies on marketing and website development, while maintaining separate brands and operations. There won’t be news sharing. “We are a multi-platform company, and we need to be aggressive about growing in all of these areas, said Publisher Ed Moss, in a UT article. “[But] they’re positioned differently than our company, and we need to keep it that way.”

DiscoverSD.com reaches 200,000 unique visitors per month, compared with 3.3 million uniques for SignOnSanDiego.com, the Union-Tribune’s website arm. The UT’s audience tends to be older, while a third of DiscoverSD.com’s visitors are between 18 and 34.

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What do you do to keep your customer after your deal of the day runs? That’s a big question for tens of thousands of SMBs — many of which have used deal a day as a loss leader and have an investment in making it work.

Companies such as Closely and WildFire Interactive have a number of promotional and marketing solutions at the ready to deal with this. So does Groupon, via Groupon Stores.

San Diego-based TipCity has taken its own approach. The company is set to offer subscription accounts starting at $99 per month to restaurants and bars for time-sensitive Flash deals that show up on the TipCity site, or come in via Twitter accounts or e-mail (i.e., $3 drafts for the next two hours).

Key to the company’s appeal is a self-serve paperless system where users simply mention TipCity to restaurant proprietors to receive the deal — or show their mobile. Restaurants and bars can set as many deals for as long as they like. They can also plan special promotions for events, such as Ground Hog’s Day or Valentine’s Day.

At this point, the company has 100 restaurants and bars in San Diego testing the system. On the consumer side, it has 30,000 users, many attributable to a partnership with The San Diego Union-Tribune’s SignOn San Diego, which promotes the service as part of its extensive deals platform. Five to seven deals are featured at a time.

“It’s a way to win repeat customers” and gain a strategic advantage, says CEO and founder Hiep Pham. “Groupon doesn’t bring in repeat customers.”

Under TipCity’s system, users are able to personalize the deals. They can receive every deal in the area, or they can choose which neighborhoods they are interested in (i.e., “Carlsbad,” “Encinitas, “San Marcos” and “Cardiff”). Pham adds that the deal with SignOn could be a model for working with newspapers and other local media in other markets.

So far, Pham adds that the big learning for the company, which has nine full-time employees, including two salespeople, is that e-mail, mobile and the company Web site are all roughly equal in importance for a flash platform. “Mobile is good for people who are in transit, or looking for something to eat. E-mail is better for people who want to plan ahead.”

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The San Diego Union-Tribune and the upstart San Diego News Network are launching competing “Daily Deal” products, with Facebook and Twitter accompaniments, and will try to eat into the lead in the local market that has been assumed by Groupon (and Living Social and many others).

The SDUT launches its Groupon-like “Sign On San Diego Daily Deal” tonight at midnight with a special offer to get $50 worth of grub at Acqua Al 2, a chic Italian eatery, for $25 (and actually, just $15 if customers use their $10 deal bucks for signing up or referring a friend). Under rules of the promotion, 50 people need to sign up for it within a 24-hour period. Six people signed up for the deal within the first hour.

The SDUT’s Daily Deal sits on a platform provided by Click-N-Shout, a Cleveland-based company — one of apparently 155 rivals, per Groupon — that is testing the waters for newspapers with the SDUT. The newspaper’s sales forces have been offering the Daily Deal as part of their portfolio for a few weeks, and there is roughly a month’s worth of inventory in the system now.

Site GM Mike Hodges notes that The Daily Deal is hardly entering virgin territory. Roughly 80 percent of potential advertisers have been approached by Groupon or other Deal-a-Day services. But the newspaper believes it has many advantages over the competition, including the ability to promote The Daily Deal on the right-hand corner of the cover of every print issue and a database of 90,000 “special offer” e-mail subscribers.

Hodges believes The Daily Deal will prove complementary to other special e-mail offers that have long been provided by the newspaper, and notes that it is possible that many users will get a daily deal and special offer in the same day. Newspaper advertisers are being approached first.

Meanwhile, The San Diego News Network, the flagship of the fledgling U.S. Local News Network hyperlocal network chain, is launching its own, similarly titled “Daily Deal” next Monday, April 12. Built to custom specs by Deal Current, a local San Diego software company run by Jimmy Hendricks, the site has sold out its first month of inventory with local companies such as Hairspray salon, Vagabond Kitchen, Extreme Pizza, The Comedy Store, Cookies by Design, Cupcake Love and All American Grill.

Company President Chris Jennewein says he believes that “very competitive” pricing — presumably more favorable than the 35 percent to 50 percent of coupon value assessed by Groupon — will make a difference. It is also important “to have a sales executive from a local company that you can trust rather than a telemarketer,” he says.

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