Coupons.com Downloads in 2009 So Far Beat All of 2008

In the first five months of 2009, digital coupon provider Coupons Inc. has already seen more downloads of its interactive discount offers than in all of 2008, the company will announce today.

According to company reports, the value of savings printed directly from the main Web site, http://www.Coupons.com, and from other sites to which the company syndicates its offers, reached $313 million from January 2009 through May. That’s slightly above the total value of the savings printed from those sites in 2008 and represents an increase in coupon value of 212% over the same period last year.

“Consumers are adopting digital coupons in droves as they search for savings, and more leading brands are turning to digital coupons to build relationships with those customers,” Coupons Inc. CEO Steven Boal said in a release. “We see no signs of a slowdown and expect to print approximately $1 billion in savings by the end of the year.”

Obviously the recession has increased consumer interest in discount offers of all types. But in an interview, Boal pointed to several other factors that have contributed to the ballistic growth of online coupons.

For example, declines in newspaper circulation, and in some cases the failure of entire local papers, have led growing numbers of users to turn to the Web for coupon offers. “The major goods providers that do newspaper couponing are really concerned about the circulation declines,” Boal said. “That’s still the primary vehicle for coupon price promotions in the U.S., but redemption rates from newspapers have gone from 2% to about half a percent in the last 10 years. Layer onto that the fact that most of the major retailers now have the Coupons.com platform on their Web sites, and it’s sort of a natural migration.”

Online coupons are also attracting a demographic that doesn’t customarily subscribe to newspaper but gets its news off the Web, Boal said. Last year the number of American users who said they only use printable coupons from the Web increased 46% to 6 million. That’s out of a total U.S. market for online coupons of 40 million users, according to estimates from Simmons Market Research.

Boal said Coupons.com has extended its online footprint to reach those Web users. The company has established links with mobile service providers such as Yahoo and last fall signed a deal with Money Mailer to send printable coupons to users’ inboxes and devices. The company also bought the mobile shopping app Grocery IQ, then one of the most popular lifestyle apps for the iPhone. In December the company launched a Facebook app that let users print and share coupons from their profile pages. And in March Coupons Inc. branched out to Twitter. Followers of http://twitter.com/Coupons can get alerts to new coupons available, including links to the printable versions.

Future growth on devices other than PCs is definitely in the cards. “Although Coupons.com has spent the last 11 years building a platform for delivery of coupons on people’s computers, this year we are rapidly moving to deliver coupons on consumer electronic devices in the home, over mobile phones and via in-store kiosks.”

To illustrate the size of coupon usage in the beginning of this year, Coupons Inc. pointed out that $313 million was roughly the price of the monthly grocery spending of 62,000 families of four, or 1,422 Toyota Prius hybrids, or 157,286 new iPhone 3GSs. In fact, Boal said, it’s roughly the gross national product of the Caribbean islands of St. Thomas and the Grenadines.

With 17.2 million unique monthly visitors, Coupons.com ranks as the 44th largest U.S. Web property and the leading Internet site for coupons and reward offers, according to figures from Nielsen NetRatings.