Deal aggregators sort through daily deals and find the best ones for consumers in return for a piece of the action. They are primed to make up a healthy part of the extended family of deals products. But it isn’t certain whether they’ll maintain the cooperation of major deals companies. LivingSocial and others have made efforts to close off some of them.

But aggregators such as The Dealmap, Yipit, Dealradar and 8coupons are making a go of it, convinced that email fatigue is inevitable, and that consumers need help sorting through 500+ daily deals. Also convinced, apparently, are Highland Capital Partners, RRE, DFJ Gotham and IA Ventures, which each participated yesterday in a $6 million, Series B round for Yipit.

As the news broke, Yipit reported that it aggregates 500 daily deal sites in 32 different cities (although about one-third of those sites, or 161, are for New York). It also says it has 250,000 subscribers, sending roughly 20,000 people a day to third-party sites. Between 5 percent and 10 percent — or 1,000 to 2,000 — buy a deal.

My colleague Jed Williams sat down today in New York with Yipit cofounder James Moran. Moran told Jed that there are many reasons for optimism about the space, although the ramp-up hasn’t always been easy. Personalization, for instance, has struggled because there aren’t enough quality deals to match personalized preferences. “Locationized personalization” seems to have a better shot.

And then, there is the question of what is the ideal location radius. In New York, it’s 10 to 15 blocks. In Dallas, it is a 30-minute drive radius. Moran notes that Yipit has worked to tackle this issue, aggregating deals for a user’s work and home routes. But it is still mulling over how to handle subway routes. One thing that has developed nicely is that Yipit has ramped up a lot of destination and search traffic and is no longer tied so much to emails, which don’t convert as well.

Jim Moran is a featured speaker at our Deals 3D conference in San Francisco July 18-19, along with executives from The Dealmap and 40+ others.

The post Yipit Raises $6 Million: We Talk With Cofounder James Moran appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Groupon is moving past deal a day with a Quiznos deal on Wednesdays that will issue an eight “signature sandwich” punch card to users for $26 — roughly half off the $51.92 maximum value. Maybe buyers will indulge in some “overage” — a Snapple and chips? — while they are there.

As reported by John Pletz, who is on the Groupon beat at Crain’s Chicago Business, the promotion covers 2,100, or more than half, of Quiznos locations. Pletz notes that Groupon is seeking to demonstrate that its model “can go beyond a single, open-ended discount to create repeat business for a merchant.” The Groupon must be redeemed for a punch card by July 4, but the cards don’t expire.

Individual Quiznos stores have done daily deals before. According to The Dealmap, Quiznos deals get 3X higher buy-ins than rival Subway. But this is the first chain-wide-deal ever negotiated by Quiznos, which approached Groupon.

The post Groupon, Quiznos Team Up for 8 Sandwich Punch Card appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The Dealmap reports that after nine months, it is off to a healthy start as a source and distributor of local and daily deals. It reports 11 million daily API queries and 1.4 million users — including the users of 675,000 installs of the mobile apps. It also has 271 developers using the API, including many media companies.

The company today issued an “infograph” with some fascinating analysis. My favorite is its breakdown of city strengths: Chicago, home of Groupon, for instance, is the top social city; Los Angeles is the top mobile city; San Francisco is the top Web city; and New York is the top e-mail city.

The infograph also shows that “free” beats deals. In fact, The Dealmap’s best deal was a giveaway of 650,000 free coffees at 7-11. Some of the findings are more mysterious to me. Why, for instance, do Quiznos deals get 3x the traffic of Subway deals?

In any case, CEO Jennifer Dulski tells us that The Dealmap’s growth trajectory has gotten to a million users “faster than Foursquare or Twitter.” Its mobile usage also shows real power. “Mobile deals are a key, key channel,” she emphasizes.

One of the company’s learnings is that every media channel brings different qualities to it. People accessing the site on their mobile device, for instance, are interested in browsing whatever deals and offers are around them, including cents off coupons from grocers, department store sales, etc. Daily deals are not necessarily what is happening around them.

Will aggregators and exchanges like The Dealmap (and competitor/partners such as 8coupons, Yipit, Analog Analytics, Tippr, Nimble Commerce, Deal Radar, Adility and others) ultimately make the cut? Partners such as CityGrid Media, for instance, expect to begin focusing more their own channels for deals.

Dulski says she is not too concerned. The types of things The Dealmap does are “way more complicated than they’d do on their own,” she says, noting the geocoding and other features used on 300+ sources. “We are getting comprehensive access to deals from the most number of sources, focusing on high-quality deals, and distributing to as large an audience as we can.”

The post The Dealmap Sees Big Future in Deal Aggregation; Tallies 1.4 Million Users appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

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.”

The post ILM:10: Deals as an ‘E-Commerce Platform’ appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

The hordes of shoppers who still enjoy standing in lines and fighting for parking spaces on the “Black Friday” after Thanksgiving is an offline event. Or is it?

Local sites are prepping shoppers who want to see what’s available at the stores, including The Dealmap, Milo.com, Local.com and Superpages. Other local media companies, including the Los Angeles Times, are helping small businesses get in on the game for Cyber Monday.

American Express is also getting in on the game with Small Business Saturday, a promotion for SMBs that include a $25 gift certificate for consumers who shop participating SMBs, and a cash donation to Girls Inc. of $1 per “like” of the effort’s Facebook page (867,594 “likes” have been registered). We also noticed that Yelp is involved with the effort, listing several recommended local SMBs on a geotargeted basis, which is really useful.

The Dealmap’s effort is categorizing and mapping more than 150,000 unique Black Friday product offers at nearly 50,000 retail locations. Smartphone owners can use their phones to check out the deals when they are on the go, and will even be notified if they are near a deal. The site reports that 300,000 people have downloaded its app.

Milo.com is also in on the game, providing sales information and, more important, real-time inventory feeds for more than 5,000 products. Its inventory feeds will include major chains, such as Target, Toys “R” Us and Macy’s.

Local.com, meanwhile, has integrated the local and daily deals from The Dealmap along with major retailer coupon codes and deals from Savings.com; loyalty card coupons from Coupons.com; and weekly circular ads from ShopLocal. Superpages.com has also done a great job integrating various kinds of coupons.

The LA Times, for its part, is supporting Cyber Monday with a Shopping Directory that is being published in its Main News section on 11/29, and also accessible on latimes.com.

The post Local Sites Prep for Black Friday, SMB Saturday, Cyber Monday appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Deals found by The DealBot are added to 8coupons’ geolocated “MoneyMap” showing deals and merchant locations. Users can weigh in on coupons by affirmatively voting on a section called “Is this deal real?” The overall capabilities of the offering appear to be similar to Center’d’s “The DealMap,” which launched last month.

Founder Landy Ung says she expects The DealBot to add from 5 percent to 10 percent more offers to 8Coupons, which currently boasts over a million coupons from more than 300,000 merchants. The site has 1.5 million monthly users, she says. Most of the site’s coupons come from partners such as ValPak, Money Mailer and RedPlum. 8Coupons’ technology enables national companies to detail local offers. (That would have been helpful last week when I brought a Denver-based coupon from Einstein’s Bagels to Carlsbad, forcing the local manager to override her computer system.)

Some are also sent in by users — some via mobile, which was the company’s initial orientation and remains a channel. The site also aggregates “deal a day” offers from Groupon and 80 others, which Ung says have been very popular, driving a “spike in traffic.” In addition, the site adds context to offers via relationships with 30 to 50 shopper-bloggers, such as 89th and Broke. “We drive a lot of traffic to them,” says Ung.

The post 8coupons Launches The DealBot; Scans Web for Offers appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Center’d, the local/social events and city guide site, has consistently reported growing traffic. But in its three-year existence, the site has never really found a niche that would set it apart from the competition.

The site, however, has kept on hammering away at local/social trends, with a strong emphasis on sentiment analysis and local mapping — no surprise, given that its leadership comprises CTO Chandu Thota, the former Microsoft Virtual Earth leader, and CEO Jennifer Dulski, the former head of Yahoo Marketplaces.

Now, the success of Groupon and other deal-a-day sites has apparently led the site’s executives to an epiphany: One of the next waves of local is likely to be deal aggregation — a path already taken by such sites as 8Coupons.com and Localofferlounge.com (and before that, by Judy’s Book). Research conducted by the company showed the power of the deal. Indeed, 80 percent of those surveyed said they feel “exhilarated” by finding a good deal.

Dulski previewed concepts behind The Deal Map at our Marketplaces 2010 conference in March –see Mike Boland’s post here — and the site went live yesterday. The Deal Map aggregates the whole gamut of socially driven deals and information, which include coupons, sales notifications, frequent flier type points, sweepstakes, new product information, events and recipes.

The goal, says Dulski, is to finally move deals beyond the silos of mail, TV and newspapers, store windows and e-mails. All are better served by a true cross-digital platform that might include the Web, mobile, social media, aggregated e-mails and APIs.

Dulski’s expectation is that a certain portion of the deals themselves may be sent in by users, some of whom will be motivated to contribute sites and reviews by cash incentives for super-frequent users. But other offers will be grabbed from a wide range of sources, including large, national deal providers; deal-a-day providers; and extracted from e-mail newsletters, social media and other sources. A larger portion of the deals will eventually be driven from the social efforts than from coupon feeds, says Dulski. The site will also have several revenue streams, including revenue sharing with the deal-a-day sites.

Dulski makes a case for the Deal Map’s uniqueness by noting it is the only site that mixes “location,” “price” and “sentiment” (i.e., how people feel about a product or location). On the map, locations of deals are clearly coded by one of 10 category icons (restaurants; health & beauty; shopping; events & attractions; hotels; food & drugs; automotive; Services; Home & Garden;  and medical. The intensity of deal areas is also indicated by a heat map.

It all looks great and is very easy to use, compared with other maps we’ve recently played with where everything tends to bunch up too much. It will be even better in future iterations when users can set up personalized categories.

While The Deal Map is billed as a a project that is both separately branded from Center’d, and integrated within it, it seems realistic to think that it becomes Center’d’s primary purpose now, just as Living Social’s Daily Deal is its primary purpose, not its Virtual Bookshelf. The space is going to be big, and the people at Center’d seem poised to ride with it.

The post Center’d Launches The Deal Map, Showing Local Deals Based on Price, Location and Sentiment appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.