It’s perhaps the oldest trick in the consumer Internet business model playbook. (And when executed properly, it’s a lucrative one.) Pull together popular information that is dispersed across the Web, give it a user-friendly sheen, and either sell ads against the crowd that shows up or charge a fee when a visitor heads off to a specific provider, sometimes both. The list is long – Monster.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, WebMD, Kayak, AllTop, AutoTrader.com, Trulia, etc. You get the picture. This is a pretty industry agnostic play. We can now add to this list The Dealmap – www.thedealmap.com.
Groupon – www.groupon.com – which I’ve written about twice previously on Kaveat – http://kaveat.wordpress.com/2010/01/04/power-to-the-connected-people/ - and http://kaveat.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/fund-raising-news/ – is The Dealmap’s primary reason for being. Even more so than media darling Four Square – http://foursquare.com/ - Groupon is using technology to match consumers in a meaningful way with local merchants. In the process, the copycats have come out of the wood work – http://tcrn.ch/bbJwED.
From The Dealmap’s site:
The Dealmap is the most comprehensive source for people to find and share the hottest local deals, all in one place. We aggregate the largest number of local deals on the Web from the largest number of sources, and make previously hard-to-find deals available to you when and where you want them through our website, social applications, our daily email, and mobile applications (coming soon).
While Dealmap’s UI could use some work, I believe that their aggregation play is a smart one. Watch for CitySearch, Yelp, and other geo-specific guides to adopt similar revenue models.
