Are We Approaching the End of the Daily Deals

First Facebook announces that they are ending their Deals project and then Yelp announced this week that they are ending theirs as well.

Stack on top of this the fact that Groupon’s traffic has fallen by 50% since July and you will get your answer… yes the CLIMAX is over.

There will always be a place for deals, but right now people are just sick of them. Although there are many small businesses that have benefited from them, right now the trend is that the businesses actually end up on the negative end.

This fact isn’t stopping Google from launching their Groupon rival product (and revenge for shunning their $6 Billion). They haven’t launched in Dallas yet, but they are already in business in a few cities including New York and San Francisco. Given Google’s might(go ahead, flex your muscle), it would be safe to assume that they will pick up Groupon’s pieces and do it right.

They have years of data and trust from from businesses because of their Adwords PPC Program. They could easily bundle Adwords in some way with deals. Throw in some Youtube video marketing and mix it in with a dash of Google Places and you have a robust local marketing package all run on Google infrastructure.

Ultimately I believe there is still plenty of money to be made in Daily Deal business model. I truly believe that they will do with their Deals what they are doing with Google Plus. They are taking the best of their competition and building a better product.

Gmail is the fuel that is making Google Plus and Deals (soon enough) unstoppable. They in essence have the world’s largest email list. Is it an wonder how they were able to get Google Plus to 25 million users in a little over a month?

Deals are here to stay! Groupon? They probably will continue, but not at the same level that they are now unless they make some drastic changes to their business model.