Where did the weekly coupon matchups go?

I’ve been asked this question in person, in email and on the Facebook page–Where did the weekly coupon matchups go?

For a long time, coupon matchups were the backbone of this blog, and many other deal blogs. Coupon matchups take a tremendous amount of time–it literally takes several hours to do one ad. Some larger bloggers are able to either pay virtual assistants to do it, or they have expensive plug-ins that help cut some of the time (but it’s still quite a bit of work). As a medium sized blogger, I just can’t afford that.

So I was using a third option–purchasing ad matchups. Yes, some folks actually spend the hours to do the matchups, then they sell copies to bloggers which helps justify the time spent doing them. Then, even the moms who I was purchasing from said it wasn’t worth their time to do it. I then found another site from which to purchase matchups, but those folks used a different format from the previous blogger, and so it was still taking me a tremendous amount of time to format them for here.

And…….after analyzing Google Analytics for the past several months, only a few dozen of you are reading the matchups that we do. I just could no longer justify spending money to purchase the matchups, the time to format them for here….and only have 35-40 people read them.

While we work this out, I ask for your patience. I realize I am at risk of alienating 35-40 loyal readers who looked forward to those matchups each week. Right now, we’re trying to figure out a cheaper and less time consuming way to bring them to you. As it was now, it just was not Smart Spending of either time or money for us to publish them. I rarely if ever, even had enough time to do deals myself because my extra time was spent doing matchups–which sort of negates the whole point of it all.

We are pursuing other options, and bringing you other features in lieu of the matchups. We’re thinking of returning to bringing you some deal scenarios for the pharmacies, and mini-matchups like for the Acme Daily Deals and other grocery store Catalina and OYNO offers. We had gotten away from doing those types of weekly features, mainly because of the time devoted to full ad matchups.We also are taking a harder look at our online community on BlogFrog, to see if we can generate interest in having more readers submit deals that they find.

I thank you for your patience and understanding, and don’t forget that HotCouponWorld has forums for just about every store out there.