We’re so happy to hear this – traditional media publishers are starting to create their own homegrown or vendor-enabled daily deals / coupon products. While there’s nothing wrong with collaborating with the likes of Groupon, Snag and Save, Team Save and the other daily deal providers, if you’re big enough or well-staffed enough or IT-capable enough, why not keep all the traffic and revenue for yourself?

PaidContent.org reported on  homegrown daily deal products by Star Tribune of Minneapolis / St. Paul, San Diego Union-Tribune (theirs isn’t new) and Yellowbook.

The Star Trib’s daily deals, called STeals, mimics the one-coupon-a-day tipping concept of Groupon, or rather of the old Groupon. Therein lies the problem for Star Trib.

The tipping concept is great for viral marketing, and we like that they encourage spreading the word by offering $10 in Deal Bucks when those you referred take the deal. BUT… Groupon is moving on to deal personalization, and will offer as many as five deals a day soon, each reaching a more targeted audience. The Twin Cities area is far too large and diverse not to offer this as well. Hopefully that’s down the road. We really like that you can set up SMS alerts of the deals.

As we peruse the San Diego U-T deals site, created about two years ago, it looks nearly identical to that of the Star Trib. That’s because they both had the help of daily deal platform startup Shoutback. While we haven’t studied it in detail as yet, we will. Shoutback’s home page promises there is no upfront fee for its help. That’s intriguing.

Yellowbook’s Weforia will launch in Boston, Phoenix and Ft. Meyers in September. If you go to Weforia.com the e-mail signup asks for your zip code. Sounds like it’s going to geographically target, and that’s good news for Yellowbook.

“A big challenge for players in the group buying space is geography,” said Mike Wilson, Yellowbook GM and VP, digital media, in the announcement.  “For example, a Manhasset, NY-based nail salon receives little value when their deal is promoted to consumers all across the New York metropolitan area. It’s not an efficient marriage of buyers and sellers. With its hyper-local market coverage approach, Weforia will help bridge those gaps.”

Here’s hoping these new products will include some classified deals from auto dealers, real estate agents, rental property managers, and so forth. Those are categories highly-unserviced in daily deals. Newspaper and broadcast site publishers who haven’t already done so – especially those in areas serviced, or about to be serviced by daily deals providers – need to move on this quickly.

UPDATE: We just noticed that Groupon Phoenix has three offers today, and one is from an auto detailer. Also, at the bottom of the landing page for the consignment shop deal there is an interesting “Groupon say…” that talks about the CropDuster Video store next door. We don’t know if that’s paid advertising or not, but Groupon is now moving into the classified arena, and marketing four different firms in one day.