I want more daily deals!

The New York Times and Bing are now offering daily deals; here are some others I want to see

In case you case you didn't know, the daily deal industry is pretty hot right now. It's actually bi-winning.

At a spry three years of age, Groupon is seeing annual revenues inch steadily closer to the big $1 billion, and clones are cropping up everywhere. First there were the basic daily deal clones--the ones who took Groupon's model and did a quick cut-and-paste job. Then the niche clones began to emerge--the sites for green deals, erotic deals (it's actually called ExoticDeals), gay deals, deals for parents, etc. Now we're moving into the unlikely Groupon clones, starting with the New York Times and Bing. 

On Wednesday, the New York Times announced the debut of its new daily deals site: TimesLimited, which will be less of a group-buying platform than a timed platform, where users will only have a certain amount of time to purchase the deal. 

The New York Times offering daily deals could theoretically make sense...or at least my esteemed colleague, Ronny Kerr, explained it in a way that made it sound like a totally logical move for the Times. Essentially it goes like this: No one reads print media anymore, which means no one sees print ads anymore, which means businesses have to go online to run their ads, which means they turn to daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial to get attention. So to keep afloat amid the mass exodus of advertisers who are taking their dollars to daily deal sites, the Times has simply done the math and realized that it, too, needs to get into daily deals.

That makes sense.

And then today, Bing announced that it, too, is getting into the daily deal space, so now this is just getting silly. Microsoft's search engine is using the DealMap to  publish local daily deals on the Web and on Bing's mobile properties. The DealMap's DealExchange platform already has 26 commercial distribution partners and sees more than 85 million unique monthly visitors. 

So clearly, starting a daily deal site is like getting your real estate license: it's easy money. 

So with news organizations and major search engines now getting into the daily deal space, here are the industries that I want to see offering daily deals:

Mail-order bride daily deals

Fertility clinic daily deals (get three IVF cycles for the price of one)

International adoption daily deals

Auto repair shop daily deals (get your car fixed the first time)

Gas and electric daily deals

AT&T daily deals (get two months of free iPhone minutes and data for the price of one)

And so on and so forth. 

Image source: Tmonews.com