More British consumers are trying to find discount vouchers to give the recession a knockout. Hitwise, the internet research company, shows that the search term ‘discount vouchers’ had grown by 47.5% between August 2008 and August 2009. And Google shows that the same term had had a 67% growth spurt between December 2007 and December 2008.

This research could mean that searching for discount vouchers is now a middle class thing: internet users are predominantly in the middle class. Some people are even boasting about how they use vouchers to save money. And companies such as VoucherCodes.co.uk are confident that discount vouchers will remain popular, even after the recession had bid us adieu. Duncan Jennings of Voucher Codes says “We won’t continue to see the growth that we’ve seen, but people will still use vouchers”.

The internet offers vouchers for anything from pizza deals to high-end retailers. Businesses, also, find that online discount vouchers are better than the old-school vouchers that they used to send to people’s mailboxes: these vouchers are targeted towards an interested audience. Most of these consumers could fall into the ‘maximising consumer’ group – they do research before buying something and they also spend time finding the best price or discount.

The first online voucher companies aggregated all the best deals in one place and made their money off referring traffic. These sites no longer have big amounts of traffic; their traffic volumes are down by 5% since August 2008. This could be because retailers are spending more time and effort in getting this type of traffic directly. And the other reason could be that consumers are becoming more wary. The market has matured and consumers are more likely to discern which vouchers offer the best value. They might be more wary of voucher websites at the top of the search results that do not offer value – their information is old and sometimes these sites have no vouchers at all.

Most of the growth in voucher searches is from people searching for specific deals and discounts. UK internet users searched for 8, 300 variations on ‘voucher’ or ‘vouchers’ during July 2008; this figure quadrupled to 34,200 by July 2009. However, searches for ‘voucher’ and ‘vouchers’ as standalone terms have either decreased or remained at the same level.

One of the industries that have benefited the most from the growth in online discount vouchers is the restaurant trade. Especially over the last 12 months – searches have increased by 226.3% since August 2008. The second most searched for term was ‘Pizza Express voucher’; Pizza Express had a two-for-the-price-of-one voucher. The few months and weeks before Christmas inspired the discount voucher craze and many retailers saw the chance to promote their goods. Tesco was the only other company in the top 10.