Published August 7th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is July 2008 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to June results and includes all deal sites from my database that meet Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement. I am sticking with the original limit as moving to 50,000 seems to cut some interesting sites.
The top gainers this month are dealtaker.com (9.86%) and judysbook.com (9.48%), both continue to recover from the slump they got themselves into just recently. The worst performer is hot-deals.org (-20.51%) which is a very old deal site with a pretty basic design that I am sure holds together thanks to the loyal members it acquired since 2000.
Published April 5th, 2008
in Popular Sites Series.
This is March 2008 revision of the Popular Deal Sites list. You can find the last month revision of the list here.
The change in rating shows the difference compared to February results. The list has a total of 25 web sites which is 4 less than the last month. There are 56 more in my database that didn’t meet the Alexa Rank < 100,000 requirement.
This a really bad month for all deal sites. None had a positive Alexa rank growth, and most of them had a double digit decline. I attribute the overall downward trend to two things, (1) the holiday season is now completely out of the 3 months rolling window that the rankings reflect, (2) online shopping is down due to the economic recession.
dealtaker.com (-40.93%) had a really bad month. Is the magic Neal Rapoport has projected on it starting to fade out now as DealTaker is being sold? But the worst result comes from another site. gottadeal.com (-185.05%) has been the worst performer for the second month in the row. They went from #14 to #20 in this month list.
Published March 27th, 2008
in Business Marketing.
Exactly 5 months ago I asked all of you to vote for your favorite deal site, and 375 of you did. The top 5 results now stand like this:
| Deal Site |
Votes |
| fatwallet.com |
82 |
| dealtaker.com |
82 |
| dealnews.com |
59 |
| slickdeals.net |
39 |
| markdownmonkey.com |
38 |
The poll was set so that each vote is bound to a unique IP meaning if you used your IP once you can’t vote again. This is not a bullet proof way of eliminating duplicate votes but you really have to make an effort to go around this limitation (if you wanted to).
The comments on the other hand were not limited by IP. With that in mind, here are a couple of facts that make me think the poll results are rigged.
DealTaker comments are spam
I analyzed the comments and it appears 5 out of 8 comments praising DealTaker came from the same IP despite different usernames/emails in the comment signature. Here is the IP used: 71.74.145.215
I appreciate if anyone can find more about the geography of this address. This of course doesn’t prove anything but I am just curious.
Only top 5 positions gain votes
If you take a look at the complete list of votes, you will notice that only the top 5 positions have gained any significant number of votes. The #6 is shopping-bargains.com with twice less votes than #5, markdownmonkey.com
I might be wrong but this fact tells me that the voting is done by the people specifically interested to move the deal site to the top 5 to get listed on the front page.
Results go side by side
This is not as obvious unless you have been watching this for some time like I have and is especially true with positions #1 and #2. I have been seeing it happen several times: as soon as fatwallet.com becomes the front runner, some magical force comes along and dealtaker.com catches up. I have not paid as much attention to #4 and #5 but as you can see they have very close number of votes as well.
I am really distressed by these findings and consider pulling the poll results off the front page. What do you think?
Published March 3rd, 2008
in Business: Strategy.
Yesterday Paul reviewed DealTaker and while we are on the subject I would like to make a quick update that last week Media General, a company that owns several newspapers and TV stations in Southeast (see the map below), announced that they signed an agreement with NARAE Enterprises, Inc to acquire DealTaker and the related online properties (PriceTaker, GiftTaker etc).
The financial details of this transaction were not disclosed but whatever the deal is, my congratulations to Neal! According to the press release, the site currently receives over 400,000 unique visitors monthly which is quite an accomplishment for an online company started 4 years back from a closet at home.
A short note to Media General investors. The same press release mentions that “DealTaker is profitable and has strong margins”. I am sure you all hope that it helps Media General’s falling stock and it might. You just need to make sure to fish out from Neal all the secrets of running a profitable deal site before he leaves. ;-)
For more information on DealTaker please read my interview with Neal Rapoport. Also for a closer look inside DealTaker’s office, check out this video on YouTube.
Published March 3rd, 2008
in Deal Site Reviews.
This week’s review is about DealTaker. Yan already featured DealTaker in an interview format which received a very high level of controversial discussions in the comments section there. DealTaker also is shown as the top deal site in the quick poll which is always there in the top right side of this blog’s home page, however I should point out that there is no way to identify the person who votes (probably except for the IP address). DealTaker also happens to be the first site I am reviewing which has an “active†forums setup (last week I reviewed DeaLoco, a new site with no “active†forum).
DealTaker is a site with a majority of its features based upon a forum software. Seeing the logo, my guess is that the logo colors were chosen to go along with the typical forum blue color. These forum blue colors have become so monotonous across several websites. We will now quickly see the various items in the home page top to down.
First item at the very top, is an image which says, “Add us to your toolbar!â€. Seeing this, I assumed that this takes to a cool firefox add-on or something like that; however this takes to a set of instructions on how to add this page as a bookmark into a folder which lists on the toolbar on top. I am not sure why the website operators believe that the users of their website will be so naive that, they need to be instructed on how to make a bookmark. And if you instruct, the instruction needs to be complete. The instructions tell you to add to the “Bookmarks Toolbar†folder (Firefox) and you are done. With me being the naïve user, what if my view settings was to not show the bookmark toolbar?
Next is a set of links grouped like this: RSS | (Log In | Register ), so I assume that the behavior of Log In and Register links will be similar. Clicking on “Log In†gives a pop up while “Register†takes to a new page, which misses a main tenet of usability: consistency. Next is a link which lets you enroll for periodical updates by email. To use this I had to sign up for an account. I signed up, clicked submit and again the “Terms and Conditions†page comes back, which again took me back to the registration page. This time I again entered the same registration details to learn that the username was taken, so I assumed that my sign up was successful. So, I go back to the home page and clicked on the login link on top, which shows the pop-up to login. However after clicking on the log-in button, again I am taken to the “Terms and Conditions†page.
Continue reading ‘Forum Based Daily Deal Site – DealTaker Review’
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