initial public offerings (IPOs) trading on American exchanges

Friday, March 7, 2014

Coupons.com (COUP) began trading on the NYSE on 7 March 2014


Crystal Paine is a stay-at-home mom in Wichita, Kansas, where she schools her three children. When not teaching them math, she’s pulling in a full-time income from her blog, MoneySavingMom.com.

Every month, 1.75 million visitors flock to her site for grocery coupons, magazine deals and restaurant discounts. When a reader prints an offer or clicks through to make a purchase, Paine gets 30 cents to $25 from a Web-coupon purveyor. Those referrals happen 3,000 to 5,000 times a day.

Every month, 1.75 million visitors flock to Crystal Paine's site Moneysavingmom.com for grocery coupons, magazine deals and restaurant discounts.

Paine and bloggers like her are fueling a surge in demand for digital coupons and the speedy growth of many deal suppliers, including Coupons.com Inc., which is slated to debut on the New York Stock Exchange today. With EMarketer Inc. predicting that more than 110 million American adults will cash in Web coupons this year, RetailMeNot Inc. (SALE), Ebates Inc. and Prodege LLC’s Swagbucks are also racking up sales.

Unlike daily-deal sites Groupon Inc. (GRPN) and LivingSocial Inc. that gained popularity by offering deep cuts -- half off or more -- at restaurants, spas and hotels, Coupons.com and others offer the types of discounts found in newspaper inserts, such as 5 percent off at a retailer or $1 off an item at grocery store.

Coupons.com, based in Mountain View, California, was founded in 1998, six years before Mark Zuckerberg began Facebook Inc. It took until 2009 for the company to surpass $40 million in annual sales, and only four more years to quadruple that, with revenue reaching $167.9 million in 2013. Coupons.com is led by Chief Executive Officer Steven Boal, who started the company and owns 9.3 percent of the outstanding stock.

Coupons.com, whose ticker symbol is COUP, raised $168 million in its initial public offering yesterday, selling 10.5 million shares at $16 each, and valuing the company at about $1.16 billion, based on the shares outstanding listed in the prospectus.

30,000 Affiliates

To expand across the Web, Coupons.com introduced its Brandcaster product in 2008, letting other sites such as mommy blogs promote coupons and make money, similar to Google Inc.’s affiliate program for showing text ads. The company now has about 30,000 affiliate publishers, the prospectus said.

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