Google has bought up DailyDeal, a German deals provider that operates in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. DailyDeal was launched as a two-person start-up in December of 2009 and has quickly grown with a reported 252,000 vouchers sold in the first quarter of this year.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a German newspaper, put the purchase price between $ 150 million and $ 200 million and said DailyDeal is up to 200 employees with €22.8 million ($ 31.2 million) in vouchers sold in the second quarter. The acquisition comes a month after Google bought the U.S. deals aggregator the DealMap for an undisclosed price.
Google has been off to a slow and measured start with its own daily deal product Google Offers. Yipit reported that Google Offers revenue dropped 23 percent in August from July even though the number of daily deals increased by 22 percent.
The service should get a little more attention with the launch of Google Wallet, which works together with Google Offers to deliver deals to users on their Android phones. Google Offers is still only available in a handful of cities such as New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Austin and Denver. But it’s planning on expanding to several dozen more cities soon.
After losing out on its $ 6 billion bid for Groupon, it seems like Google is content to buy up smaller Groupon clones and figure out how to make a go of it in the daily deals business. Google still has a lot to learn with its daily deals offering and with the scrutiny Groupon is facing these days with its IPO, it makes sense for Google to take its time. This is a big bet for the company, one that will ultimately help it tap into the huge market for local advertising. So I doubt that it’s done shopping for daily deal companies.
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