Coupons.com – Another IPO candidate

According to Juniper Research, the global digital printable coupon industry is projected to grow from $6 billion in 2011 to $46 billion by 2015. Recently, online coupons and deals site RetailMeNot went public with a $230 million IPO. Analysts believe that their competitor, Coupons.com, is also eying an IPO in the near future.

Coupons.com’s Offerings
Mountain View, California–based Coupons.com was founded in 1998 by Steven Boal, who was inspired by the sight of his father-in-law waking up on an early Sunday morning to clip coupons over coffee. Boal spent three years developing the technology that let digital coupons serve the purpose of these Sunday inserts. Soon they became one of the leading providers of coupons, including digital coupons, printable coupons, coupon codes, loyalty cards, and mobile promotions. As consumers shifted their loyalty to online news sources and the overall sales of newspapers declined, the coupon industry also began shifting its publicity medium to the Internet.

Today Coupons.com delivers coupons to customers through web pages, email campaigns, and the newer social and mobile media initiatives. But it is not restricted to the Internet world. Coupons are also distributed through store kiosks, shopping carts, and consumer electronics.

The company has an array of offerings for consumers, marketers, and publishers. Consumers can access their discount saving measures through the flagship Coupons.com site. To improve the customer’s shopping experience, Coupons also has Grocery iQ, a shopping-list app that lets shoppers create, organize, and share shopping lists. The app is integrated with Coupons.com’s core business of coupons and helps consumer find and use coupons for the products of their choice.

The company continues to build on its offerings for the consumer and recently acquired San Francisco–based recipe and meal planning service, KitchMe. KitchMe is a Pinterest-like site for recipes where highly rated and quick cooking recipes are collected from multiple sites. They offer the ability to plan for meals using simple drag-and-drop commands and includes the ingredients from the recipes into the user’s shopping list. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

For marketers, the company offers several marketing programs, including the digital free-standing insert (DFSI) which is an online version of the Sunday inserts. Besides online coupon codes and printable coupons, marketers can also get their coupons distributed through the Coupon.com’s print and mail solution. The company also provides additional services such as verification, redemption, payment, and settlement of both digital and print coupons. Given the high traffic on the site, Coupons.com is also becoming a favorable place for marketers to advertise their products.

According to a Nielsen report, Coupons.com is the 42nd most visited site in the country. Its corporate customer list includes several brands with retailers across more than 52,000 store locations. Clients include CVS, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, and Safeway, to name a few.

Coupon.com’s Financials
Besides advertising revenues, Coupons.com earns a commission every time a consumer downloads a coupon from the site. Annual financials are not publicly disclosed. Analysts estimate that revenues nearly doubled in 2011 to more than $100 million. To date, the company has received $277 million in venture funding from investors that include Passport Capital and Greylock Partners. Its latest rounds of funding was held in 2011, when it raised $230 million from these two investors and helped value the company at more than $1 billion. Considering recently listed RetailMeNot’s annual revenues of $144 million and its current market capitalization of $1.45 billion, the more than $1 billion valuation for Coupons.com appears in line with market conditions. Analysts believe that the company may now be getting ready to go public.