AT&T to Take On Groupon With $10 Promotion for Daily Deal Site

May 2 (Bloomberg) -- AT&T Inc., aiming to tap the billion- dollar market for online coupons dominated by Groupon Inc., will introduce its own discount site within the coming weeks in Los Angeles, Atlanta and Dallas-Fort Worth.

The site, on its yellowpages.com subsidiary, is sweetening the deal for consumers who register with a $10 credit beginning today, said Dawn Benton, an AT&T spokeswoman.

AT&T, the second-largest U.S. wireless carrier, will have to compete in the market against Groupon and a growing number of new entrants, including Facebook Inc. and New York Times Co. Facebook, the social networking site with more than 500 million users, last month said it is trialing a daily coupon site in five U.S. cities.

The U.S. daily deals market, with discounts of as much as 90 percent at restaurants, clothing stores and nail salons, will grow to $3.93 billion in 2015, from $1.25 billion this year, according to a projection from BIA/Kelsey in March. Under the most favorable conditions, sales could reach as much as $6.1 billion, the Chantilly, Virginia-based consulting firm said.

AT&T plans to roll out the daily deal site to other cities and offer it on mobile devices, said Benton. She declined to say which businesses may be part of the initial trial.

Market-leader Groupon, based in Chicago, is planning an initial public offering later this year that would value the company at between $15 billion and $25 billion, two people familiar with the plans said last month.

Dallas-based AT&T rose 9 cents to $31.21 at 12:49 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. The shares had gained 5.9 percent this year before today.

The Drudge Report: Relevant News Or Garbage

Mr. Trump has already begun trying to find other ways to lure the media, including a discussion of Mr. Obama’s academic background and whether he deserved to be admitted to Columbia and Harvard. But it’s unclear whether the media will continue to bite the way it did on the birth certificate story. And Mr. Trump is increasingly facing questions about his own history. But he told the Post, “The fact that it was a settled issue did not keep it from becoming a major part of the political discussion in this town for the last several weeks here. So there’s absolutely no question that what the president released in 2008 was his birth certificate and answered that question, and many of your organizations have done excellent reporting which proved that to be the case. But it continued; the president thought it was a sideshow and chose to take this step today.”