Things can get pretty crazy for you during holiday shopping season if you happen to run a popular deal site. I can tell this from my own experience. As I got tied up in the daily routine I completely missed this important bit of news. On December 2, 2010 Techcrunch spilled the beans - come the new year the folks at WhaleShark Media have one more property to worry about (in addition to 4 more they acquired last September).
So, let’s do the count. RetailMeNot, Deals2Buy, Coupon7, Cheapstingybargains and Deals.com are all under one roof. Just how big this piece of pie is? Pingdom, an up-time monitoring service I use for my sites, once ran a very interesting analysis. They took traffic estimates released by Google for top 1000 websites and drew some pretty amazing conclusions.
* The top 10 websites get 42% of the visitors to the top 100, and 21% of the visitors to the top 1,000.
* The top 100 gets 50% of the visitors to the top 1,000. I.e. the top 100 together get as many visitors as the following 900 websites counted together.
Based on my own top lists, RetailMeNot currently ranks #1 among coupon sites, Coupon7 is #25. Deals2Buy is #7 among deal sites, Cheapstingybargains is #17, Deals.com is #28. When the lists are combined, the ranks become #2, #54, #13, #31 and #51 respectfully (all based on Alexa). Quanticast publishes directly measured visitor stats for some of the sites in deal & coupon niche (e.g. here are stats for SlickDeals, for FatWallet, DealNews, and AnandTech).
I took these numbers and did some math. Assuming that traffic distribution for top 100 sites in deal & coupon niche stays the same as globally for all sites, the 5 sites acquired by WhaleShark Media will account for around 10% of all deal & coupon traffic generated by top 100 sites, or if you follow the same logic, around 5% out of all visitors for the top 1000 sites. On a monthly basis this comes to approximately 4.4M unique visitors out of 44M for top 100, and 88M for top 1000.
0 Responses to “How big is WhaleShark’s share of coupon business?”