Every day, LivingSocial offers heavily discounted prices on local restaurants, event tickets and services. On Black Friday, they’re doing away with the zip code, to present a list of national deals that they hope will make the holidays merrier for both their customers and their marketing partners.
It’s time for another Dollar Lunch Day thanks to LivingSocial. This time, the daily deal site is taking on San Francisco. On July 13, LivingSocial Instant Deals will go live in the City by the Bay and more than 100 restaurants will offer lunch for $1 to celebrate.
Google. Facebook. Groupon. Yelp. LivingSocial. Amazon. It’s a lineup of online juggernauts — all executing thrusts and parries to build an empire in the group buying space. In case you can’t keep up — and who could — Google is testing Google Offers in Portland, Amazon is playing around with AmazonLocal in Boise, ID, and Yelp continues to dodge cable cars in San Francisco and keep its Deals afloat.
The online deals space is certainly heating up as more and more marketers get in the game. The decision for many is whether they want to build their own version of a deals site or whether they want to use one of the big names in the space.
We have talked about the LivingSocial v. Groupon situation here before. It’s always interesting how readers respond. There appears to be a very misguided line of thinking that Groupon has the lead in the daily deal space that is insurmountable and all others should just fold up their tents and call it a day. Well, Amazon didn’t just give LivingSocial $175 million because it was feeling generous. It did it because it felt like there was room to take a shot at Groupon. If the traffic chart below from
Following yesterday’s headline grabbing news about Eric Schmidt being removed from his CEO post in early April, Google just happened to let the cat out of the bag on a new product designed to give Groupon and LivingSocial a run for their money. The new product is around the daily deal concept and will be called Google offers.
In the online deal space there is no doubting that Groupon is the 800 lb gorilla of the bunch. They have just received a whole lotta cash for their operations and their shareholders and are busy buying up competitors.
Yesterday, I took a look at whether Groupon’s decision to pass on Google’s ridiculously generous offer of around $6 billion for the 2 year-old company was a good move. One thing that wasn’t looked at was the investment that was made in the competing deal site, LivingSocial, totaling $183 million ($175 million from Amazon and $8 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners). In the end, could an investment that equals about 3% of what Google offered Groupon be the beginning of the end of Groupon’s dominance of
