White Label Providers: How Publishers Will Dominate Daily Deals

Local publishers have begun entering the Daily Deal space, and for good reason.  Many are helped by group buying solutions, to which publishers outsource some combination of sales, deal production, and technology.  These white-label platforms enable local publishers to offer their own Daily Deals, as well as provide consumers a viable alternative to using mainstream Daily Deal sites. With their audience and authority, publishers are uniquely positioned to offer a very compelling Daily Deal product.

These group buying solutions are split into two categories:  services that have no consumer brand of their own and operate as pure white-label platforms (i.e. Analog Analytics, Group Commerce, NimbleCommerce), and co-branded partnerships between consumer facing Daily Deal services and publishers.  Other differentiating factors among these services include:

• Providing a sales force so that the publisher doesn’t have to sell their own deal
• Providing customer service
• Deal production and copywriting
• Ownership rights of consumer email lists

The last bullet is of particular importance: email lists are a contentious bargaining point. Down the road, email ownership can also determine whether a publisher may choose to renegotiate with white-label providers (if they own the list, they can easily move to a cheaper service later on down the road, but if they don’t, they may be hesitant to switch providers). Publishers who use co-brand typically surrender those emails to the white-label service.

After the jump, we’ll take a look at some of the major players in the industry, both those who act as a pure white-label and those who co-brand.

Pure White-Label Players

Analog Analytics

Analog Analytics works with over 850 publications and 20,000 advertisers to deliver interactive deals and coupons specifically to the local publisher market.  Most of these are coupon sites, but they have a solid platform on which to build and generate Daily Deals.

ChompOn

ChompOn’s primary goal is to become a powerful white-label service, providing a simple widget that can be dropped in to any publisher site. They are said to be rolling out offerings with Stanford University, CampusFood.com, AllMenus.com, and Sitepoint.

Dealicio

This New Hampshire based startup prides itself on being easy: easy to use, understand, and for businesses and local publishers to quickly start generating revenue off deals.  Its main product includes embedding deal widgets in the form of simple HTML codes into any site’s framework.  Each widget is given its own control panel and tracking to allow the site and the merchant to keep track of how many consumer purchase the deal or click through the link, thus eliminating middlemen.

DealWerk

Adility’s DealWerk helps to bring the Daily Deal platform to any site or publication by integrating deals seamlessly into site architecture.  They help to bring in sales for coupons, value cards, and gift cards.  In addition they can generate customized API for websites in order to deliver deal content in any form of the site’s choosing, and can set up RSS feeds.  DealWerk currently provides deals for over 45 unique North American markets.

Group Commerce

New York based Group Commerce was founded by the former CEO and several higher ups at Doubleclick.  Exect these guys work with top-tier publishers to bring its users exceptional Daily Deals. Perhaps most importantly, they are one of the only pure play white label providers that offers a sales force solution.

NimbleCommerce

NimbleCommerce has not only worked with local publishers, like Phillydealyo above, but is the white-label behind recent Daily Deal entrant Spotlight by dining reservation site OpenTable.

Offer Foundry

Offer Foundry bills itself as an “advertising and promotions platform” that creates effective, attractive online coupons and deals that can be easily distributed through email, social media, and mobile communications.  With a “low entry price point”, they ensure that publishers big and small can easily enter the Daily Deal space with few prohibitions.  Furthermore, they contract with third party sales forces to provide sales (see here).

Co-branded Players

BuyWithMe

While New York-based BuyWithMe is competing to be a Daily Deal site on its own, it also works with a select number of local publishers to deliver exclusive promotions to their customers.  Metro, the free daily paper seen across the country, and Boston.com both rely on BuyWithMe to publish their own Daily Deals.

DealOn

DealOn is one of the largest branded Daily Deal providers and also runs OfferEx, an exchange for deal suppliers and resellers. DealOn is rolling out its co-branding strategy with Zagat partnership, which is launching soon but has been already well received by Wall Street.

Groupon

Already a major player in the Daily Deal space, Groupon ventured into publisher partnerships by signing an agreement to bring deals to 28 different newspapers owned by the McClatchy Company.  The first two papers, The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star, plan to run their Groupon-powered deals by the end of the summer.  It’s unclear at this point if they’re truly white label or just co-branding with their new publisher client.  We’ll be sure to check out their new product as soon as it launches.

Tippr

Another Daily Deal service, Tippr has quickly become a major player to compete with larger, more established peer sites.  Its recent foray into white-label publishing with BuzzFeed Deals proves that it has the chops to support a major traffic site.  We predict Tippr will be working with a larger portfolio of both national sites and local publishers in the future. Read more about Tippr’s publishing platform.

TownHog

San Francisco-based TownHog provides white-label publishing for a number of local outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle (pictured above) and WCBS 2 New York.  The latest creation from Silicon Valley vets DotBlu, TownHog joins the ranks as one of the many growing Daily Deal sites in the United States.  The offers found on these publisher sites are the exact same offers one could find on TownHog’s homepage.

Any additional services that should be included in this list? Comment below or call us out on Twitter: @yipit. Otherwise, we’ll get back to building Yipit, which gathers and filters daily deals based on your tastes.