Now visitors to m.bing.com will find a deals tab that will allow you to search and drill down for localized daily deals around you via mobile. Eventually Bing wants to integrate deals into its homepage as well, as now you have to actually search for the name of a business to find the Bing Deals on the web.
Groupon, with reportedly $2 billion in revenue and a $6 billion acquisition offer from Google last year, is everyone’s great white hope at the moment. Success at this scale is eye-opening and when a new way of getting cash into a companie’s bank account happens, everyone takes notice. What’s the last time we saw this kind of “Omg that’s a lot of revenue” industry earthquake? Google.
(Google, hilariously enough, is now planning its own deals service, Google Offers.)
The problem here is that humans just don’t have the energy or space to track so many deals. When we first heard the news about Bing, Mike Arrington commented, “Someone needs to create an app that just aggregates all the daily deals in your city for you.” Somebody does, it’s called TheDealmap, and they just partnered with Bing on this launch.
Groupon had a great model: exercise editorial oversight and charge the deal maker for the distribution. I’m not sure the revenue from chain of affiliate partnerships in these kind “me too” plays will be enough to justify maintaining the product. Owning the deals space takes effort, not afterthought — Twitter shut down down its @Earlybird service after two months of tweeting out uninspiring deals.
And while setting up an ancillary deals service might work for hyper-targeted audiences, your newspaper/search engine/social network/used car wiki is not Groupon. And it will never be Groupon.
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