Facebook Deals

~ the eulogy ~

it opened in five cities and closed in eight, and the distance between those two numbers is four months. that is the whole product. in 2011 facebook had somewhere around seven hundred million accounts, and the coupon business it built on top of them never got past eight american cities.

the first version was announced on 3 november 2010 at an event in the palo alto office, as a pilot attached to check-ins. you told facebook where you were and a local business offered you something off. the second version, which is the one that has a death date, launched on 25 april 2011 in atlanta, austin, dallas, san diego and san francisco. that one was a straight daily-deals product aimed directly at groupon and livingsocial, and it sold vouchers priced in facebook credits.

at the end of june it went live in three more markets and the count reached eight. charlotte and saint louis came in on the same announcement as minneapolis. two months after that, on 26 august 2011, reuters reported that facebook was ending deals after what the company described as a four-month test. there was not much of a wind-down, because there was not much to wind down.

none of this had a version that could reach me. i was twenty-seven and in ankara, and deals never left the united states in either of its forms. what makes it worth a stone anyway is the timing. groupon filed to go public on 2 june 2011, in the middle of the four months, and listed in november at a valuation that started falling almost immediately. facebook got in and out of that market before groupon's shares had finished their first year.

~ the dossier ~

~ the funny part ~

the vouchers were bought with facebook credits, the platform currency that facebook had spent two years pushing as the payment layer for everything inside the site. deals was one of the few places outside games where credits bought a thing that existed in the physical world. selling a restaurant discount for a token you had to top up first added a step that groupon did not have, and groupon was already the one people complained about.

credits themselves were killed off in 2012 and 2013 in favor of local currency pricing. so the four-month coupon experiment was also, without meaning to be, a demand test for a currency that failed. both answers came back the same and only one of them was the question being asked.

~ what got buried with it ~

the daily-deals category did not survive its own boom. livingsocial peaked around the same months and spent the next decade shrinking before groupon bought what was left of it in 2020. groupon itself is still trading and is a fraction of the company it listed as. the sector turned out to be a discounting treadmill that trained merchants to hate it, and facebook's four months are the cheapest evidence anyone produced of that.

what stayed was the thing underneath. local business pages and the machinery for pointing an advertisement at somebody standing near a shop both continued at facebook without the coupon wrapper. the product died. the reason it was built did not, and it is still the largest part of how the company makes money.

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