LivingSocial partners with Examiner.com

The local news site will distribute LivingSocial's daily deals within its network of sites

As the Groupon/LivingSocial death-match heats up, both are looking for new avenues to market their brands. After releasing a string of seemingly offensive Super Bowl TV ads (I thought they were funny) that saw a flood of angry responses on social media sites, Groupon is now backtracking and attempting to clean up the mess. Meanwhile, LivingSocial is making new friends on the hyperlocal level.  Local content provider Examiner.com announced Wednesday that it will be teaming up with LivingSocial to bring daily deals to its 25.2 million unique monthly visitors. 

Examiner.com will be offering the deals in all of the 130 U.S. markets in which LivingSocial operates and LivingSocial will be the headlining deal in Examiner.com's upcoming "Insider Deal" marketplace.  The deals will not be exclusive to Examiner.com visitors (in other words, the deals promoted on Examiner.com will be the same deals that LivingSocial subscribers get in their email inboxes each day), but the partnership will bring additional traffic to LivingSocial from the local front, as the discounts will be accessible across Examiner.com's network.

"Our readers come to Examiner.com to connect with what they are passionate about," said Examiner.com CEO Rick Blair in a prepared statement.  "Now they also have access to discounts that let them experience more of what they love doing in their communities."

The partnership could provide a significant boost to LivingSocial's reach, as Examiner.com reaches 240 markets in the U.S. and six in Canada, compared to the total 170 global markets that LivingSocial currently reaches. 

Examiner.com is a content company powered by local contributors who power the site's local news across 25 different categories, including arts and entertainment, business and finance, family and parenting, autos and motorcycles, sports, politics, and more. The site largely appeals to younger users (71% are between the ages of 18 and 49), the college-educated (62%), and those with higher incomes (nearly half of the site's readers live in households earning $75K a year or more). For the most part, these are the same groups that LivingSocial aims to reach.

Founded in 2008, Examiner.com has grown from 60 cities to 246 in two years and continually recruits new contributors to write content on their local communities. The company is a division of Clarity Digital Group, which is owned by the Anschutz Company, a Denver-based investment company.

In 2010, LivingSocial's traffic spiked 438% over 2009, and it now counts 20 million subscribers in its network.

Image source: LivingSocial.com