Published September 18th, 2006
in Business Social.
The most popular bargain hunting forum has had a hard time last week when its users revolted over the change announced by the company to the way they calculate deal rating when people vote for the deal on the forum. The change was to remove “negative voting” which according to FatWallet “was often abused and rarely contributes” to a new approach where users could only “boost” (give positive vote to) a deal. Guess what? It produced an uproar and users exodus to the main competitor and forced FatWallet to roll back the changes.
SlickDeals uses a similar voting system but compared to FatWallet it is more user centered. If you are a part of SlickDeals community you usually give users “reputation points” for the good deal they post rather than “give green” to a deal posting (as FatWallet’ers reffer to the positive vote). Yet this reputation based voting system seems to be the cornerstone of the SlickDeals forums community. Users as they gain reputation get certain profile attributes and other perks such as ability to give negative reputation to other users and access to closed areas of the forum.
The idea of voting has been so successful that such newcomers as dealspl.us, dealplumber.com, and dealspy.org have based their entire sites around it and others are eager to catch on. They have certainly learned the lesson from digg.com success!
Published September 18th, 2006
in Popular Sites Series.
I have always wanted to do it and I think now is the time. I will list bargain hunting sites I know and will sort them by popularity. Alexa rank and Page rank (by Google) will do for the measure of popularity. One can argue how accurate these ranks are… well, if you have other ideas let me know. Meanwhile here it goes…
| # |
Web Site |
Alexa Rank |
Page Rank |
Online Since |
| 1 |
fatwallet.com |
332 |
7 |
29-Nov-1999 |
| 2 |
slickdeals.net |
416 |
6 |
10-Nov-1999 |
| 3 |
anandtech.com |
1,506 |
7 |
24-Aug-1997 |
| 4 |
techbargains.com |
2,041 |
6 |
03-May-1999 |
| 5 |
bensbargains.net |
2,647 |
6 |
21-Mar-2000 |
| 6 |
dealnews.com |
2,871 |
6 |
20-Jan-1999 |
| 7 |
dealsea.com |
4,849 |
4 |
27-Jun-2001 |
| 8 |
dealcatcher.com |
5,955 |
6 |
28-Jul-1999 |
| 9 |
edealinfo.com |
6,162 |
5 |
12-Dec-2000 |
| 10 |
judysbook.com |
7,828 |
6 |
11-Aug-2003 |
| 11 |
flamingoworld.com |
8,803 |
5 |
19-May-1999 |
| 12 |
xpbargains.com |
10,899 |
5 |
29-Nov-2001 |
| 13 |
dealspl.us |
11,924 |
3 |
15-May-2006 |
| 14 |
spoofee.com |
12,291 |
4 |
31-Dec-2000 |
| 15 |
dealtaker.com |
14,358 |
4 |
08-Feb-2004 |
| 16 |
gotapex.com |
14,918 |
6 |
29-Apr-1999 |
| 17 |
dealofday.com |
17,158 |
7 |
30-Aug-1999 |
| 18 |
dealsofamerica.com |
19,426 |
3 |
06-Sep-2003 |
| 19 |
fishingfordeals.com |
20,616 |
4 |
23-May-2000 |
| 20 |
cheapstingybargains.com |
24,726 |
3 |
20-Jan-2005 |
| 21 |
hotdealsclub.com |
27,267 |
3 |
27-Dec-2000 |
| 22 |
bradsdeals.com |
29,169 |
4 |
29-Jun-2005 |
| 23 |
dealslist.com |
29,577 |
3 |
18-Jul-2000 |
| 24 |
ableshoppers.com |
33,658 |
5 |
08-Oct-2000 |
| 25 |
gottadeal.com |
35,107 |
5 |
27-Jan-2003 |
| 26 |
passwird.com |
44,882 |
5 |
28-Aug-2001 |
| 27 |
dealplumber.com |
49,376 |
4 |
17-Jul-2006 |
| 28 |
dailyedeals.com |
58,061 |
5 |
18-Feb-2000 |
| 29 |
bargaineering.com |
61,141 |
4 |
01-Dec-2004 |
| 30 |
mightygoods.com |
65,585 |
7 |
21-Aug-2004 |
| 31 |
dealhack.com |
69,189 |
3 |
06-Feb-2005 |
| 32 |
morestuff4less.com |
74,020 |
5 |
05-Nov-2002 |
| 33 |
dealspy.org |
75,296 |
3 |
03-Mar-2006 |
| 34 |
dealdetectives.com |
75,558 |
4 |
03-Oct-2004 |
All sites in the list have Alexa rank less than 100,000 and Page rank more than 0. Will do an update in a month. It will be interesting to see how the list changes.
I excluded pure price comparison sites (e.g. shoplocal.com, nextag.com, etc), coupon databases (e.g. currentcodes.com), and sites specialized on just freebies (e.g. freesamplesite.com, absurdlycool.com, etc).
dealmac.com is not listed. It is closely affiliated with dealnews.com (as well as deallink, dealcam, and dealcoupon) therefore including only the best ranked site from the group.
A few last notes. damideals.com was just 7K short of getting into the list. Will check them out next month. Will have to check scottishwallet.com as well since it seems to be growing fast. dealunion.com has good Alexa rank but missed the Page rank test.
Inspired by Pete Freitag’s Deal Shopping Sites Roundup which received tons of comments.
Update 09/21: adding xpbargains, bradsdeals, cheapstingybargains, dealhack, bargaineering and gottadeal
Published September 17th, 2006
in Business Marketing.
My favorite bargains site DealsPl.us has announced they are looking for a sponsor to their web site. What is new about it? They are selling the sponsorship from eBay. Provided your site has certain level of visibility this probably makes sense. eBay takes around 5% from each sale. Typical ad space reseller takes 45%. Makes a difference, huh? For DealsPl.us it is also PR since it might as well be one of the first sales of the sort.
Another interesting part of this whole story is that you can have a glance on what web traffic a site like this can have. Not bad IMHO being launched just a couple of months back.
