Be careful you are not investing in a fad

A little while back there were several domain wanted threads for deals or daily deal type domains.

Well it now seems like daily deals are becoming to fall out of vogue.

The Atlantic did a story yesterday on how people are sick of the sites.

Excerpt:

There was a daily deal sites bubble. Too many companies, not enough interest. People are sick of it.

Getting one or two emails from your daily deal site of choice was nice, but people are over it, continues MacMillan. “52 percent, of U.S. consumers who use daily-deal services say they feel ‘overwhelmed’ by the number of e-mails they receive about deals on a daily basis, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by PriceGrabber, a division of Experian Plc.

About 60 percent of people surveyed said they feel the daily-deal industry is too crowded.”

Source

Then there was Facebook exiting daily deals. Facebook is abandoning their GroupOn-like Deals product. Launched four months to the day (almost), Deals worked in tandem with the also recently axed Places product, so it’s not a total surprise that the Deals is also done.

Gavin O’Malley wrote that Group On has seen a drop in traffic by 50 %

Excerpt:

Has Groupon’s ship sailed? Well, with its IPO pending, the group-buying leader has seen traffic decline nearly 50% since its peak in the second week of June.

That’s according to new Hitwise data based on Web-based traffic, but excluding mobile and app-specific traffic.

“Regardless … the drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer has been significant,” according to Bill Tancer, GM of global research at Hitwise.

During the same time period, rival Living Social saw a 27% increase in visits to its site.

Overall, visits to Hitwise’s custom category of Daily Deal & Aggregator sites were down 25% for the same time period. What explains the decline — and Groupon’s in particular?

So this is just one recent hot area that seems to be less attractive from a pure domain speculation.

There will always be new trends and products, there will be money to be made investing in those domains early. But make sure you are early and not late. Make sure you know when to take a good offer unless you have your own plan for developing the domain.