Leading Coupon Site Tjoos Acquired By Internet Brands

Internet Brands has announced the acquisition of Australian online coupon site, Tjoos, bringing it into its stable of more than 100 websites.

Tjoos (pronounced “choose”) grew by 150 percent year on year to well over 1 million unique visitors in February 2010. This growth was driven by the site’s more than 500,000 coupons from more than 180,000 merchants.

Tjoos co-founder Bart Jellema was also recently named The Next Web Australia’s Startup Person of the Year.

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Internet Brands (NASDAQ: INET) is an Internet media company that sees over 55 Million uniques/month from its websites that focus on specific vertical markets.

Internet Brands CEO, Bob Brisco, had this to say about the acquisition:

“This is a hot area, discount discovery, fueled by community participation, is growing very rapidly and will continue to do so. Consumers want deals, and coupons are a massive marketing channel for both small and large merchants.”

In the competitive world of online coupon sites, Tjoos attempted to differentiated itself by focusing on building relationships with merchants as well as the development of proprietary tools for automatically verifying the accuracy of coupon codes. The latter of these was part of a plan to create the most accurate coupon database on the net.

There’s no official update from Jellema (his twitter account “@tjoosdude” has actually been taken down and there’s nothing up on his @bartjellema account either  ) but there’s no doubting this is great news for he and his partner Kim Chen (who’s @tjoosgirl twitter account is actually still up) who have worked tirelessly on both the project and the building the Australian tech startup scene over the past few years.

Knowing both of them, there’s no doubt that after some time spent on the The Startup Bus and a bit of R&R involving some scuba-diving and zoology, they’ll be back with another kick-ass project.

Great news.