Google today announced its purchase of Dealmap, a startup that aggregates daily-deal offers from all over the web. The terms of the deal were not made public. The acquisition comes on the heels of Google's roll-out of Google Offers in April.
It's fairly obvious why Google wants in on the deals game: to grab some of the $14 billion running through the local-deals space. Last year, the search giant failed to buy the big kahuna of the category, Groupon, with its $6 billion offer.
"Google's major ad revenue comes from search and is derived from small and medium businesses," said Jay Samit, CEO of SocialVibe, an advertising and technology company. "So this acquisition -- coupled with Google+ -- completes Google's offering to their core customers. With Google and Facebook now challenging Groupon and LivingSocial, the daily-deals space is a fight of the big boys."
Indeed, the early success and popularity of social network Google+ (it's been out for just over 30 days now and has close to 20 million users) shows that Google now has a place where the daily deals can be marketed and sold. With Google+ business pages readying for launch in the next two months, marketers can start gearing up to offer customers deals through Google.
The Dealmap buy also provides Google a 15-person-strong team that 's well versed in the social-shopping market. Dealmap collects deal information from about 450 sources and groups the deals by location, and has around 2 million users. "We are impressed with what the Dealmap team has accomplished and excited to welcome them to Google," Google said in an email statement. "We've been thrilled with the early success of our commerce offerings, and we think they can help us build even better products and services for consumers and merchants."
The startup was founded last year in Menlo Park, Calif., by Jennifer Dulski and Chandu Thota. On her blog, Ms. Dulski said, "We're passionate about helping people save money while having great local experiences and in Google we've found the perfect partner that shares this passion, as well as our vision and strategy. We believe that joining Google will help us innovate in new and unexplored areas of commerce."
