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January 2, 2006

Find a Deal with Clipfire.

Michael Arrington

20 comments »

I like Clipfire , which allows users to submit ecommerce deals, and other members can vote the best deals to the top of the site, and add appropriate metadata, like tags, to the links.

Think Digg, but only for ecommerce. It’s a young site and not a lot of users are there yet. But founder Kevin Carey has a big trick up his sleave - not only does he allow user submitted links to have affiliate codes, he absolutely encourages it. So users have a big incentive to push suggest great deals on the site…they can make real money doing so.

RSS feeds for everything, of course. I like this almost as much as Woot (you do know about Woot, right?).

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Next Generation Shopping » Blog Archive » ClipFire - Deal Aggregator, Social Commerce

    April 10th, 2006 at 7:48 am

  2. Aggregating RSS feeds at ProBargainHunter.com

    November 12th, 2006 at 11:12 pm

  3. Anonymous

    January 23rd, 2007 at 8:58 pm

Comments

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  1. James J.

    January 2nd, 2006 at 10:33 pm

    A nice idea, but they missed an opportunity to make money now. Allowing users to include their affiliate codes in the links they post does give them an incentive to post new deals, but Clipfire doesn’t make anything from it. They should have implemented a system like Fatwallet’s Cash Back program where they would use their own affiliate codes but split revenues with posters. This way there would still be an incentive for users to post new deals and Clipfire would actually make some money too. Clipfire could still implement such a system, but it’s something they would need to do before they have a lot of users because such a change at that point would likely upset some of them.

  2. Chris Yeh

    January 3rd, 2006 at 12:30 am

    I disagree James. The goal here is to drive usage of the service. Power posters are essential to building up a critical mass of deals.

  3. Pete Freitag

    January 3rd, 2006 at 5:51 am

    Hey Mike have you seen Dealazon.com? It uses Amazon’s web services to find the best deals on amazon, and then lets you search and sort through them on the site or via RSS.

    Disclosure - I built it -
    http://www.dealazon.com/

  4. mitch

    January 3rd, 2006 at 6:40 am

    Check out slick deals (slickdeals.net). It’s not really web 2.o-ish, but has great deals from a larger user base.

  5. Fortino

    January 3rd, 2006 at 10:32 am

    Seeing that you mentioned to “Think Digg” I felt you should know that Digg has had this feature for months.

    Check it out…

    http://digg.com/deals

    Fortino - Out!

  6. Andrew

    January 3rd, 2006 at 12:37 pm

    Doesn’t encouraging people to include referals end up encouraging people to submit lots of spammy free i-pod deals and stuff that arn’t actually ‘deals’?

  7. David Rubin

    January 3rd, 2006 at 3:46 pm

    Interesting, I built http://www.discountwatcher.com/ a couple of years ago. It is a services that scours the Internet for the latest discounted items and then organizes it’s finds by category, brand and store. All RSS enabled of course. I’ve been working on a 2.0 version of the service, in some ways it looks like I’ve been scooped by Clipfire :-(.

  8. Pete Cashmore

    January 4th, 2006 at 3:47 pm

    I agree with James J - this model makes no business sense. If you’re going to create a spammer’s haven, you might as well earn some cash for your trouble.

  9. Paul Montgomery

    January 5th, 2006 at 12:26 am

    Revenue sharing is a fine idea, but revenue gifting is a waste. Surely the Clipfire peep/s could parse the URLs and insert their affiliate IDs 50% of the time to make it sharing instead of gifting?

  10. Dealsinus

    January 7th, 2006 at 11:34 am

    Clipfire is really doing great job allowing users to post links. They must be having idea to implement their own affliate links in future.

    Also see another deal site. http://www.dealsinus.com

  11. Marc Mezzacca

    January 8th, 2006 at 2:09 am

    I don’t think the point is to try to parse affiliate URLs… That would make no sense. Look it how Google started. If ClipFire can get a good userbase then they can worry about revenue later… I’m sure they have thought of how, I can.

  12. Kevin Carey

    January 9th, 2006 at 9:38 pm

    Marc, you are right on target. The users provided the content, they deserve the credit.

    Clipfire should earn its revenue from the service (aggregation, searching, etc.). The Google association is fits perfectly.

    Kevin Carey
    http://www.clipfire.com/

  13. Daddy-O

    July 11th, 2006 at 9:29 am

    As a startup Deals & Coupon site trying to gain more traffic, I like the idea of Clipfire. It allows us to get more exposure to our site.

    We try and post only our best deals there, because it all comes down to credibility.

    “Daddyo” Dan
    http://www.daddyodeals.com

  14. Chris Felton

    July 18th, 2006 at 10:47 am

    I have been keeping an eye on Clipfire; however, it just hasn’t taken off yet. It seems like a really great idea. A search engine for deals sounds great!

  15. Yan Bezugliy

    September 21st, 2006 at 4:58 pm

    That is right. The user base just isn’t there. I have tried a few popular keywords and none came clipped.

  16. agreatindian

    October 12th, 2006 at 3:30 pm

    Looks great. its good feature for clipping the deals

  17. Luke

    November 14th, 2006 at 5:37 pm

    Similar site: http://www.boddit.com. No clips but deals comparison engine is better.

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