Daily Dibs Blog

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U Daily Deal: Daily Deals From The Entertainment Book Company

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If an existing company has a significant online audience or deep local merchant relationships chances are that company has considered or already started a deal of the day site. With that said, one of the most recent entrants into the local deal of the day game should be no surprise to anyone – it is the folks that bring you the Entertainment book.

Entertainment Book 2010

UDailyDeal.com appears to be Entertainment Publications, LLC’s daily deal play. The site itself does not exactly signal that the Entertainment book folks are serious about this effort (seems like a very quickly put together site), but we have been tracking them now for a couple of weeks and they consistently have a deal each day and the deals are proving to be quite popular with our audience.

Not only have they done a daily deal site, which is sort of a no-brainer, but they appear to actually have a niche target market in mind. Based on the information on their very spartan homepage, they appear to be targeting the college student market. From what we can tell so far their deals are primarily at local restaurants near and around the many college campuses in Atlanta.

How well is UDailyDeal doing?

For starters, they appear to only have deals in Atlanta. Their homepage shows signup options for Boston and Philadelphia, but those cities do not appear to be live yet.  As far as their performance, they don’t publish the number of sales on their site, so we can’t say for sure how well they are doing, but we suspect that the advantages they have with local merchants are significantly offset by a lack of online audience.

However, as we mentioned earlier, the deals seem to be quite popular and are restaurant focused.

We’ll do a little digging and find out what sort of rev share they are taking from their advertisers.

Valpak Deals Launching Soon

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In an email we received today, Valpak announced that they will have live deals starting November 3.

Valpak had previously announced that they would launch in Omaha, Long Island, New Haven, Las Vegas.  Their annnouncement does not indicate if they will launch their deal of the day product in all those markets simultaneously.

Beginning Wednesday, November 3, Valpak Deals will offer you daily deals and savings offers to be used at a top-rated business in your area. Save up to 90% on dining, shopping, entertainment, professional services and more. From cupcakes to disc brakes, adventure sports to posh resorts, pet foods to import brews, home goods to goodies, it’s all in the Pak!

Valpak has one very clear advantage in launching daily deals – selling to merchants.  Valpak has not only a significant number of merchant relationships, but also feet on the street in many of their markets.  They should have no problem lining up quality advertisers, which is probably becoming more and more difficult in some markets.

Interestingly, Valpak is not launching in any major markets.  Although there are less potential subscribers, there is also less competition for selling to advertisers and the cost of acquiring customers will also be lower.  We think this will probably serve them well.

Depending on the size of the email lists they already have access to in these markets, we expect that Valpak will probably be successful with this deal product.  We’ll check back on their progress after they launch – and of course we will add their deals to Daily Dibs.

Wow.com – AOL’s New Deal of the Day Site

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AOL recently announced that they too will join the hundreds of other daily deal sites that are following in the footsteps of Groupon.  We think that AOL is well positioned to make this work even if they are just duplicating what many others are already doing.

How is Wow.com Different?

As far as we can tell from the limited info on their website, they aren’t really different.  They say:

If you want a deal, we listen and offer up your bargain-of-choice on a silver platter at an astronomically discounted price, helping you stretch your hard-earned dollar to infinity and beyond. So be sure to stay tuned and prepare to be “wowed!”

What exactly does that mean?  Our guess is not much.  Judging from the image of a sample deal on their site, $25 for $50 worth of food at a Seafood restaurant, we don’t exactly get the vibe that they are about to turn this model on its head.

Will AOL’s WOW.com Succeed?

If you define success as making a good chunk of change at high margins,  then the answer is yes.

We are assuming that between existing email lists and tons of available ad inventory, they will be able to acquire a very substantial number of subscribers.

For the here and now, lots of subscribers means lots of money in the local daily deals business.  If you have a couple hundred thousand subscribers in a city, a certain percentage will open the email and a percentage of that will buy.  Those percentages usually equate to a high margin cash generating business.

The quality of the deals they offer, though important, is not the key part of the equation.  Sending emails with good deals to hundreds of thousands of people will result in an impressive influx of cash as long as this continues to be a 30% – 50% margin business.

As soon as Wow.com has live deals we will add them to DailyDibs.com

GivShop Austin Joins the Crowd

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GivShop.com joins an already crowded group of Austin daily deal sites.  Like aDealio and Localiter, GivShop is actually based in Austin.

How is GivShop Different?

GivShop plans to differentiate themselves with a focus on giving back to non-profits.  From their website:

“Here’s the fun part. GivShop is giving 50% of our profit to local charities and we want your help in selecting which charities get the cash. Select a non-profit from the list and they receive a part of the deal.”

Wow – 50% of their profit?  If that doesn’t tell you about the unbelievable margins in the daily deal space, nothing will.

Will They Succeed?

Judging from their team, they are looking to be more than just another local player in Austin.  It is hard to tell at this point what audience advantages they bring to the table if any.  My guess is that they are counting on their non-profit approach to win over users and businesses.  I’m not sure if that alone will be enough as the cost of customer acquisition continues to increase.

Good luck GivShop – we put you at the top of our list in Austin.