Coupons, Get Yer Coupons! (From Facebook?)
The Internet Coupon market is huge, and getting bigger. I can remember back in 1996, the small web company I was working for thought web coupons were a great idea! (Of course, we were so far ahead of our time, no business understood what the web even was!) Sigh. Anyway, Facebook is experimenting with coupons now too!
Facebook jumps into crowded coupon market
“(Reuters) – Facebook began offering users in five U.S. cities coupons for everything from wine tastings to concert tickets on Tuesday, turning up the competitive heat in an increasingly crowded market.
The special Deals coupons, which Facebook users can purchase directly on its service, offer discounted prices or access to limited-availability goods. Facebook will take a cut of each transaction, though the company declined to say how much.
With the new service, Facebook becomes the latest Internet heavyweight to jump into the red-hot daily deals market pioneered by Groupon a few years ago. Last week, Google Inc began marketing a new daily deals service dubbed Offers to users in Portland, Oregon, with plans to expand to San Francisco and New York, and Amazon.com invested $175 million in LivingSocial in December.
‘Although the market has seen huge growth and there are big players already there, it’s not something that’s locked down, said Ray Valdes, an Internet analyst at research firm Gartner.
‘I expect to see churn among the vendors as they try one thing and it works for a while and other vendors find new ways of better meeting users’s needs,’ he said.
Facebook, the world’s No.1 social network with more than 500 million users, is betting that social interaction will help set it apart from the dozens of companies currently offering online daily deals.
The coupons available on Facebook are specifically geared toward group activities, such as a river rafting trip, rather than for individual items such as a discounted pair of jeans. Facebook users can easily recommend interesting-looking deals to their friends on the service.”
So, will you get your coupons off Facebook? Hummmmm?