The DealMap reports that after nine months, it is off to a healthy start as a source and distributor of local and daily deals. It reports 11 million daily API queries and 1.4 million users –including the users of 675,000 installs of the mobile apps. It also has 271 developers using the API, including many media companies.
The company today issued an “infograph” with some fascinating analysis. My favorite is its breakdown of city strengths: Chicago, home of Groupon, for instance, is the top social city, Los Angeles is the top mobile city; San Francisco is the top Web city and New York is the top email city.
The infograph also shows that “free” beats deals. In fact, The Deal Map’s best deal was a giveaway of 650,000 free coffees at 7-11. Some of the findings are more mysterious to me. Why, for instance, do Quiznos deals get 3x the traffic of Subway deals?
In any case, CEO Jennifer Dulski tells us that The Deal Map’s growth trajectory has gotten to a million users “faster than FourSquare or Twitter.” Its mobile usage also shows real power. “Mobile deals are a key, key channel,” she emphasizes.
One of the company’s learnings is that every media channel brings different qualities to it. People accessing the site on their mobile device, for instance, are interested in browsing whatever deals and offers are around them, including cents off coupons from grocers, department store sales etc. Daily deals are not necessarily what is happening around them.
Will aggregators and exchanges like The DealMap (and competitor/partners such as 8Coupons, Yipit, Analog Analytics, Tippr, Nimble Commerce, Deal Radar, Adility and others) ultimately make the cut? Partners such as CityGrid Media, for instance, expect to begin focusing more their own channels for deals.
Dulski says she is not too concerned. The types of things that The Deal Map does are “way more complicated than they’d do on their own,” she says, noting the geocoding and other features used on 300+ sources. “We are getting comprehensive access to deals from the most number of sources, focusing on high quality deals, and distributing to as large an audience as we can.”