So I was doing research for tomorrow's SFGate.com post on daily deals websites (yes, I'm still blogging semi-regularly over there), and I ran across a three-year-old blog post detailing the environmentally conscious deal a day sites out there. Would you like to know what they're up to?
EcoSteal, which promised to save the planet "one steal at a time," is busy restructuring their business model.
Guffly --"If eco-friendly & style made a lovechild, they'd call it Guffly. A new product every weekday!" -- quietly stopped updating its Twitter feed nearly a year ago; its site is MIA.
Ecobunga is now a Facebook-only concern.
I checked some other green deals sites: Go Green Deals has not been updated since January of this year, Green Deals Daily has a terse shut-down message, the Big Green Deal is the Big Green 404 and Hip Green Deals went dark in December 2009. And in a little bit of Rage Diaries history, Ideal Bite -- which used to be a source for some of my links -- went dark in 2009 and the domain is now for sale.
(Note that Ideal Bite is one exception to the success that Bob Pittman's had building businesses in the newsletter space; this is possibly because, unlike Thrillist, Daily Candy or Tasting Table audiences, the Ideal Bite audience may not have been avid shoppers.)
Naturally, I wanted to know why the green deals market collapsed. Here are my theories, in no particular order:
1. The recession happened and many of the people who loved feeling good about buying green decided they loved not being broke a whole lot more -- and curbed their "ethical" spending practices.
2. Hippies are not exactly impulse shoppers.
3. The investor money went to social networking and social commerce sites -- which is now we now see "do gooder" social shopping sites like Ethical Deal, Green Box Top, Blissmo and Dealgooder.
I haven't seen a lot of press looking at this. I am happy to be the press to look at this story (hint, hint, any business editors out there looking for an enterprise reporter with a flair for features). Or, you know, I could just blog my theories until they become the accepted wisdom per search engine results.
In the meantime, I'll be over here quietly persisting in reducing, reusing, recycling --and seeing where eco- and e-commerce go next.
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