Dealmap Launches ‘Exchange’ for Deals

Center’d's The Dealmap has launched what might be described as a mashup between CityGrid and AdSense for deals: DealExchange. It’s more CityGrid than AdSense but the new tools (APIs, SDK, Widgets) are intended to serve all the constituencies in the local coupons and deals ecosystem: publishers, coupon sales channels, developers and the businesses themselves.

Deals can be created for free, individually, or submitted in bulk. There are widgets for publisher sites — that’s the AdSense part — and premium placement throughout the network. That’s the ad model, although it’s all “ads.”

Center’d was the reinvention of Fatdoor, which was intended to be a “hyper-local” social network with features that in some way anticipated Foursquare. Fatdoor never really launched and was transformed into the female-centric “semantic” local search, planning and recommendation site Center’d.

Center’d was and is doing OK but generally the site has struggled to differentiate itself from its peers. But when CEO Jennifier Dulski, original Fatdoor co-founder and CTO Chandu Thota and their team launched The Dealmap in March of this year I knew they had found the thing that would pave the way to their exit.

There are a number of coupon and deal aggregators, but The Dealmap has emerged as the “go-to” vendor for deals among local publishers and others. They offer both distribution and deals inventory, very much like the role that CityGrid plays in the local ecosystem.

My prediction now is that The Dealmap will be acquired within the next six months and maybe sooner. Potential buyers are IAC/CityGrid, Google, Yahoo (MSFT if they’re paying attention), YP publishers, newspapers and local media groups (e.g, Cox, which owns ValPak), even a daily deals site like Groupon perhaps. Even Twitter, although that’s more remote as a possibility.

In fact there are so many potential buyers for the site and its growing network that it’s all but impossible to bet against an acquisition.

Center’d has received just under $10 million in total funding (by my calculation). In The Dealmap, the company has built an extremely valuable asset that can survive a cooling of the daily deals segment if it happens in the next 12-18 months as it inevitably must.

An acquisition in the $100 million range would offer investors a 10X return. But that is cheap, especially if multiple companies start bidding for it. By comparison to the almost $6 billion Google was willing to pay for Groupon even $300 million would be a massive bargain.

Part of the appeal of The Dealmap and the new exchange is their “independence” from a larger player of course. However all the companies and “constituents” that I mention above need to take a serious look at an acquisition for all the reasons that I’ve articulated and that you might further imagine.

The Dealmap is squarely within the trendy new “Venn diagram” mantra rapidly turning into a cliche: “mobile, social, local.” So when the eventual Dealmap acquisition is announced you can say you read about it here first.