Amid Groupon’s IPO Frenzy, Analog Analytics Offers Old Media a White-Label Life Ring

Much has been blogged about social couponing in recent weeks, from Chicago-based Groupon’s planned IPO, which values the company  somewhere between $2 billion and the moon, to the debut of Google Offers in Portland, OR.

Yet for all the lip service paid to the phenomenon that includes LivingSocial, BuyWithMe, Tippr, and perhaps hundreds of others with “Daily Deal” offerings, hardly a word has been buzzed about Analog Analytics, a two-year-old startup based near San Diego, in Solana Beach, CA. Analog Analytics has followed a white label business model, staying behind the scenes by providing its Web-based social coupon platform as a service to more than 850 “old media” publishers and broadcasters nationwide.

Analog Analytics provides a Web-based technology platform that enables newspapers like The Orange County Register, New York Newsday, and NBC TV to offer daily deal coupons to their respective subscribers as well as an intra-media network that includes 850 radio, TV, daily and weekly newspapers, cable TV, and alternative publications. The company’s reach will be extended further when Analog Analytics finalizes its partnership with a yet-to-be-named cable network, according to Ken Kalb, the company’s co-founder and CEO.

Ken Kalb

“We’re growing very rapidly,” says Kalb, who estimates revenue has been growing at a monthly compounded rate of roughly 50 percent. Kalb says the company counted 1,898,263 page views for all its sites from May 8 to June 7, and its workforce also is on a strong growth curve. The corporate and accounting managers are based at the company’s headquarters in Solana Beach, while software development is based in Portland, OR. The total headcount has more than doubled since March, from 25 employees to 55.

Kalb says he started the company in 2008 with co-founder Tom Buscher partly out of frustration with the lack of accountability in old media advertising. Kalb may be best known as the founder of Continuous Computing, a software developer for the wireless industry, and Buscher was the company’s software architect. Continuous Computing agreed last month to a buyout offer from

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.