Catch Of The Day founder: Our group buying rivals are pretenders
Group buying site Catch Of the Day has joined the squabble over which is Australia’s biggest bargain offering.
It follows claims and counter claims by the bosses of Cudo, Spreets and Jump On it over traffic and engagement levels and the level of savings offered to consumers.
Writing on the Catch Of The Day blog, founder Gabby Leibovich said:
“Unlike some pretenders out there, our database was not bought, our customers are not joining to win an iPad, our Facebook followers are not based in Guatemala, and Google hasn’t seen a cent from us in regard to Adwords. This small company, which began in a garage five years ago, is going to teach the big boys—those with big ad budgets and big media companies behind them—how it’s done.
Among “the big boys”, Leibovich is taking on is US-based giant Groupon in a row over complaints of domain squatting.
The group buying sector is currently one of Australia’s most bitterly contested. Last week Cudoaccused Groupon of using “bait and switch” advertising tactics,an allegation the site is yet to respond to.
Tim Burrowes founded Mumbrella in 2008. He worked on Mumbrella until 2021. At various points he was editor, content director and editor-at-large.
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“Google hasn’t seen a cent from us in regard to Adwords”.
Are they serious? They’re bidding on their brand term on Google right now, and I’ve seen them appear on plenty of other searches related to the shopping category.
Spare us the outright lies, especially when anyone can see them.
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Care factor?
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Interesting considering a simple search in Google for catchoftheday presents a CatchOfTheDay Google Ad?
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i just googled “catch of the day” and an adwords ad came up….. ?
pretty sure that means google is seeing $$$
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Go for it “Catch of the Day”, you’re the best.
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pity they trade is crummy products – not quality
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all the Groupon copy cats in Australia are rubbish, after getting hair removal/facials offers every second day I unsubscribed.
Oz market is too small, we have 2 major cities while in US there is 52 states and over 200 million pp!
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Dont worry Catch of the Day, Yahoo will destroy Spreets quickly and Sensis’s offering with destroy itself
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To all group buying companies: NOONE CARES which one of you is the biggest/best/can pee the furtherest. Just focus on providing decent deals and we’ll all get along nicely.
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Perhaps their Google spend is zero because their ads and offerings are crap and nobody bothers clicking. No clicks = no spend.
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I think he refers to Scoopon, not Catch of the Day in relation to Adwords.
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Jo – agreed! And what’s wrong with joining to win an ipad?! I want an ipad for free don’t you?
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Not sure that bigger is better for consumers .. especially when it comes to redeeming the vouchers. Some offers are so oversold you cant get to use the voucher for months.
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I want to like the company, and I’ve bought things on CatchoftheDay, but as long as they domain squat on Groupon, they completely lose my respect
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He’s referring to their daily deals site Scoopon.com.au. They don’t spend any money on Google and in all likelihood are the more profitable of the leading daily deals sites. Because they started with the Catch of the Day database of customers they were able to fast track their growth. At some point they did “buy” those consumers, they just didn’t buy them at the time for Scoopon. There’s a long way to go in this space and while the first mover advantages were immense, it’s far from clear who will emerge on top and how many players will survive.
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I check http://grouponbot.com more often then I check groupon now.
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It is a wonder none of them have a solution for customer & merchant redemption on Mobile device yet?
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Ha ha – who do they think they are kidding. They donated their COTD database to scoopon. Inheriting a database from a parent company is even worse than buying one
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the suit resides in Manly… (that place on the other side of the bridge near the beach, sometimes there are whales there!)
the suit was taking the slow ferry to work the other morning, Monday i think it was, and dived in the morning paper. Shattering his morning bubble of news and coffee came a backpacker (foreign accent – i assume he was a back packer) and a platoon of signature (or in this case email address) collectors in loud LIVINGSOCIAL tee-shirts and thick broken english accents.
The suit proceeded to watch them accost tourists and local morning travelers alike, hounding them for their email addresses. The tourists that pointed out that they were only visiting ( this was about 10:30AM i’ll admit, being a monday morning i was a little shady from the sunday arvo session, thus late to work and sunday was a lovely day, remember?..) were met with some ramble about how it didnt matter if they lived overseas/interstate and that no harm would come from coughing up their email addresses.
Bear in mind the environment, A FERRY, JUST BEGINNING ITS JOURNEY, there was no way of politely escaping this aggressive email address enthusiast, so most punters gave theirs away just to get rid of him. A local girl had the email collectors IPAD thrust in her face and was again told to ‘just give him the email address, you wont get spammed). It was heavy pushing and even though they didnt approach me, i watched with interest.
I wonder how many of these ’email addresses’ collected in such ways are presented as bona-fide customers/enthusiasts of these start-ups?…
as many, many people have pointed out, how many waxes and cake offers do people living in a small city like sydney need anyway?..
BUBBLE…
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@ The Suit .. The JumpOnIt backpackers are out and about in the CBD this morning. Take cover
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I don’t care which one I buy from. I use CouponGroup (coupongroup.com.au) to see all of the deals in one place and just pick the best…
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