The content wars are not theoretical. They’re active. And most publishers are losing.
AI scraped the web. Flattened nuance. Flooded every search with synthetic content. It did what all good machines do—replicate fast, answer blandly, and destroy differentiation. The result? Global search traffic collapsed. Publisher revenues fell. Reader trust frayed.
In this chaos, you had two choices: go algorithmic, or go human.
Tom Church, Deepak Tailor, and Tom Kelsey went human.
Latest Deals was launched in 2016 with no venture capital, no media blitz, and no exit slides. Just three founders and an idea: in a noisy, machine-written world, people would still seek out trusted advice—if it was simple, honest, and came from a human like them.
“A 3,000-word AI review doesn’t beat a text from your mate that says ’this is great,’” Church says.
“People trust people. That’s the OS we built on.”
While others fed the machine—chasing scale via keyword padding and content velocity—LatestDeals.co.uk did the opposite. It built a forum. Not a content farm. A real forum, circa Web 2.0: human posts, upvotes, comments. Conversations. The kind of thing early Reddit or Mumsnet users would understand intuitively.
It worked.
Today, the platform has over 3 million registered members, making it the UK’s largest online shopping community. It has saved users an estimated £50 million. It runs a 7-figure business with no outside funding. On Trustpilot, over 2,000 reviews average 4.5 stars. Social reach? 230,000 on Instagram. 200,000 on TikTok. 500,000+ in Facebook groups. WhatsApp—of all things—is now their fastest-growing channel.
“No algorithm there,” Church says. “No interference. Just signal. And people respond to signal.”
The platform’s success lies in its structure: members post deals, share discount codes, offer budgeting hacks. Others upvote. The best rise. No brand posts. No paid placements. No AI summaries. Just a clean game loop of discover → share → validate.
In 2019 it won the SPARKies Award for Best Disruptor, recognised as a standout in the UK’s South West tech ecosystem for being decidedly un-techy. It’s not sexy. It’s not scalable in the Silicon Valley sense. But it works.
“We’ve probably seen a dozen VC-backed competitors burn out,” says Tailor. “Some raised millions. Then they handed their UX over to GPT prompts. You can’t automate community.”
Tailor, who won BBC Dragon’s Den winner in January 2016 for a separate company, understands visibility. But LatestDeals has taken a different path: invisibility, until momentum made it obvious. The company has flown under the radar for years—bootstrapped, lean, durable. Carl von Clausewitz would have appreciated the strategy: fight only the battles that matter.
The company does use AI but it’s invisible to users. Behind the scenes it reviews images, flags suspicious content, handles moderation queuries. Not to replace judgment—but to assist it. Church puts it clearly:
“You don’t let AI touch the front of house. It’s back-office tech. That’s all.”
Beyond the forum, LatestDeals offers tools built around utility: a supermarket price comparison engine, the UK’s only Amazon price-per-unit calculator, and a browser extension that provides verified discount codes in real time. These tools don’t shout. They serve.
Meanwhile, traditional media is losing ground. SEO is gamed. Ads are blocked. AI now answers the queries that used to deliver affiliate clicks. Publishers built castles on borrowed land and Google moved the fence.
LatestDeals didn’t play that game. It built the village instead.
For SMEs, the lesson isn’t to abandon tech. It’s to pick your stack carefully. Use AI as a tool—not a brand voice. Don’t compete with the flood. Step sideways. Be trustworthy in a way machines can’t replicate.
LatestDeals didn’t try to win the AI race. It rewrote the rules of engagement.
And for now, that’s why it’s still standing.
