In the US, the world No 2 Daily Deal site Living Social has significantly changed it's business model. While starting as a traditional one deal per day site, Living Social in September announced that they were increasing the amount of deals listed by 4 times. So this means they are no longer offering daily deals, instead having constantly running deals available year round. The increase in deal listings was just for their travel deals section, but is likely to be rolled out to all types of deals over time.
The selling point for merchants is that they can get more exposure on a busy deals site. If their deal runs for longer they can presumably sell more deals. Living Social is also promising more data around the deal such as views on the page, customer demographics and the like. This might be an incentive for companies to sign up to longer term deals. It's great for the deals sites, they get to sell more, and have less drumming up of new deals.
The downside we can see is that many brands tend to want deals as a one time thing, not constantly running. If you can search the internet at any time and find a deal then you are less likely to pay full price. As consumers we love it, but businesses may not take to this new concept.
Living Social is the second largest daily deal site in the world, so we assume they know what they are doing. We've noticed an increase in the numbers of simultaneous deals on New Zealand deal sites such as GrabOne.co.nz this past year. It obviously started with the single deal each day, then a few NZ sites offered a side deal. Before long there were tabs offering up to 5 deals. Then the "even more" tab hit us with dozens of deals each day.
We have also noticed that the length of deals stopped being just 24 hour deals a year or two back. Most kiwi deals sites run deals for at least 3 days now. It will be interesting to see whether other US sites follow suit, majorly increasing their total amount of deals. I think they will, and NZ deal sites will follow. At the end of the day it means more deals for everyone, and that's a great thing.
