14 DAY TRIAL // While some may be disillusioned with daily deals, Google is doubling down on them, using its sacred homepage to promote a local daily deal, coming via its Google Offers platform. Google rarely uses its homepage to promote its products and has never put third-party ads on it.
Now, according to several reports, Google has used its ultra-minimalistic homepage to entice users into buying discounted museum tickets. It's the first time Google has used the space to advertise Offers.
The move is a great indication that Google is very serious about its daily deals site.
The offer was for museum tickets to the American Museum of Natural History in New York which are regularly priced at $25, but were now only $5.
Google confirmed that it placed the offer and said that it occasionally uses its homepage to highlight some of its products. It added that users get to benefit from local offers the site may run.
The homepage has been used before to highlight big Google products, like its Chrome web browser or the Nexus phones.
Google Offers is a rather typical daily deals site. It's currently available in several cities in the US, but Google is expanding its reach. So far though, while it has promoted Offers, it's been in testing mode.
Google is perhaps trying to see how much interest it could spark by running an offer on the homepage and also get people to find out about Offers in general.
While Google is committed to Offers, the service is part of a much broader and more ambitious move at Google, Wallet, which plans to revolutionize payments.
Google Wallet will enable users to pay for things, in stores, with their mobile phones. Mobile payments are a huge, unexplored market and there are several players wanting to crack it and several proposed ways to do it. Google is betting on NFC for now.