I first profiled Scott Wainner back in November 17 of last year. Scott and I go way back – all the way before the dot com boom. Unlike me, Scott sold his sites for millions before the Internet crashed. Then he pulled a dot com coup by buying back one of them for pennies on the dollar. Scott’s story is a great epic of a man who may have the longest Internet winning streak in history.
Scott is trying to keep that winning streak going by ordering up a ReviewMe review of his newest Internet venture call Dealighted. And I have to admit, this is exactly the kind of stuff I expect from Scott Wainner.
Dealighted From The Reader’s View
Dealighted is a tool for online bargain hunters to help them quickly find fresh new online deals, coupons, and free stuff (we all love free stuff). The site aggregates user contributed deals (around 650 each day) posted to sites like Slickdeals, Fatwallet, and Anandtech, and identifies those deals that are the most popular (usually around 125). As soon as a popular deal is identified, the deal appears at the top of the Dealighted homepage.
Dealighted is unique because they’re aggregating user forum posts via a spider instead aggregating editorialized deal posts written by a website staffer. Unlike other deal aggregators, Dealighted doesn’t “barf” all deals out to the user. Instead, Dealighted’s homepage aims to weed out the bad deals and only show those truly hot deals.
Dealighted also features a price search engine that lets you see retail prices for a product at different stores, along with any recent deals and coupons that might be available for that product. To my knowledge, there are no other sites that mash current deals and coupon data into a product price comparison engine, like shop.dealighted.com. There is one site that tries to do this manually (called secretprices.com), but they only have deals available for 50 or so products each day whereas Dealighted have user contributed deals for thousands of products.
Dealighted From The Web Marketer’s View
Finding a great deal on the Internet is nice but if you’re reading this blog, you want to know how the site makes money as well. Dealighted is a web marketer’s dream. While it looks from the outside like the site has an entire staff updating deals and product prices, Dealighted is in fact, completely automated – the site runs itself. The deals are pulled from other deals forums and the product prices in the Dealighted shop are supplied from the same service that supplies TTZ Media.
Dealighted’s main income source comes from the product price links and not the deal links. When you click on a store link on any of the product pages and visit the vendor, Dealighted makes money. Supplementary revenue comes from Google AdSense ads at the bottom of the page. I’m surprised Scott hasn’t added hot deals from his ResellerRating site to the mix. I assume he wishes to keep Dealighted on a strict CPC model.
While the site may run itself, it’s pretty much useless if no one visits. This is where Scott’s Internet marketing experience comes in. In addition to ordering reviews on my blog and Shoemoney’s (there maybe others), Scott is leveraging his two other sites, TechIMO and ResellerRating, to promote Dealighted. ResellerRating gets over 1 million unique users each month, so that alone should send Dealighted a great deal of targeted traffic.
Being a private company, I have no idea what level of income Dealighted is pulling in and Scott refuse to share the figures. However, I have a feeling Scott won’t need to wait too long to make his money back from these reviews. I didn’t nicknamed him Scott “Winner” for nothing.