Interesting article in the NY Times today, Shifting Coupons, From Clip and Save to Point and Click about the leading print media coupon company’s move into on-line copupons. Vallassis Communications is creating a new coupon portal & brand: RedPlum.com to cater to woman “discount seekers”.

According to the aricle : RedPlum will join a small cadre of similar sites, like CoolSavings.com, Coupons.com and ValPak.com, that have struggled to build traffic and wean consumers off paper coupons. In the 12 months that ended in October, the number of visitors to coupon sites grew by only 6 percent over the previous year, to 20.3 million from 19.1 million, according to ComScore, an Internet marketing research company.

This slow growth of on-line coupons is evident in Google Coupons as well. There appears to be little or no growth in either coupon users or total coupon creation.

Even though Google has been actively promoting coupons via AdWords for over a month, they have only snagged 500 some odd subscriptions to their coupon service via Google Co-op.

Total coupons available through Google Coupons for the major markets seems to have stayed even or declined in the same timeframe with some markets showing as much as an 18% decline in total coupons.