WhaleShark adds RetailMeNot to its arsenal

In one fell swoop, WhaleShark Media doubles the yearly traffic to its coupon code and discount sites

WhaleShark Media, a marketplace for coupons and deals, announced Thursday that it has added another powerful weapon to its arsenal: online coupon site RetailMeNot.com.

The acquisition cost the company a good deal of its most recent funding round, estimated at $90 million, which came from Austin Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Adam Street Partners. Founded in 2009, WhaleShark has in the past year jumped all over trends that continually and correctly indicated burgeoning success in the areas of online discount providers, like RetailMeNot and Savings.com. (After all, isn’t Silicon Valley powerhouse Google supposedly poised to dole out a few billion dollars, a record, for deal-of-the-day site Groupon.)

Founded in 2003, RetailMeNot attracts millions of users to its site hunting for deals through search engines. Users who search queries like “macys coupon code” or “expedia discount” will more likely than not see a RetailMeNot result in the first couple of results. (I know because I’m one of them. RetailMeNot has saved me 10 to 20 percent from time to time on random online retail purchases, it’s no joke.)

RetailMeNot serves up coupon codes, deals and shopping tips from more than 70,000 retailers.

WhaleShark’s business strategy seems to simply entail acquiring every notable and successful coupon and deal sites. Prior purchases include: Deals2Buy, CheapStingyBargains.com, Deals.com, CouponShare and CouponSeven. The total traffic for all of WhaleShark’s subsidiaries adds up to over 100 million unique visitors for the year.

For comparison, RetailMeNot alone attracted over 90 million unique visitors in the past year. Black Friday and Cyber Monday were naturally huge traffic days for the site, netting 1.2 million and 1.5 million site visits, respectively. Both statistics indicate 30 percent jumps from the year before, something that matches up with other Thanksgiving shopping data already reported.