Additionally, they spam search engines (look at their HTML and tell me where the H tags are) but for sure they have money.

VERY fortunatelly the UK internet advertising bureau found out all of the RMN tricks and decided to ban them nationwide. A good move for a cheating company made of tricks dedicated to fool journalists and basic users into cliking for cookie stuffing.

I wonder how much moola RMN actually make to sustain paying 3 people to run the business, if it is a business?

A quality assurance team could be put in place to validate the authenticity of coupons in conjunction with the feedback they receive from their users.

Other sites do this.

While their model is very controversial from an affiliate standpoint, consumers seem to love them. So this may just be an industry disruption that is here to stay. It’s up to the merchants to decide if they want to pay RMN commissions and whether they want to be listed at all. If enough of the big merchants say “remove me” they will no longer have any value. So it’s definitely in RMN’s interest to cater to merchants and offer them valuable customers.

“With RMN highlighting operating with just 3 employees, it is obvious that, not all coupons are collected by the employees. Also from my statistics from their forums, we see that there is no real community there and nor is there any reward for submitting coupons”

The coupons are entered through the toolbar, so that is why you do not see activity in the forums. Just like there other tool bugmenot.

I’d suspect, as you suggest, that some heavy script scraping is going on and that’s why many in the coupon industry are not fans of RMN. Our server logs tell many stories that back up our suspicions that somebody (actually many “somebodies”) are scraping our sites routinely. A guy no longer in the industry as far as I know once told me he did hourly scrapes of another coupon site and that was all he did to keep his own site updated. Many of us with coupon sites feel our hard work and quality testing is used against us by people who SEO’d their way to the top using the content of others. (I’m not just pointing at RMN here.)

As for community involvement, knowing it’s hard to start and maintain a vibrant community, I’d be surprised if more than 5% of RMN’s coupons were posted by a real community of individual users.

Just my 2 cents . . . I’ve enjoyed the review and commenting. :)

As for old models, morality and professional courtesy should not be phased out with new business models. While it’s true that exclusive coupon codes are not copyrighted, they do have value and have been specifically provided to facilitate a single merchant/publisher relationship. Publishing non-authorized coupons can be a violation of the affiliate agreement and RMN relies on affiliate marketing for much of their revenue and is bound by those agreements. (Why not just share the link to where the exclusive coupon is published instead of lifting the unauthorized coupon? Answer, because the revenue would go to a competitor.)

As for Google creating a search operand, that would not be the same as republishing exclusive coupon codes since the search results would still link to my or another coupon site. I see no problem with that and would probably welcome such an operand if it were open.