Opentable Samples Limited-time Dning Deals

If Opentable Spotlight pilots in New York and Boston prove successful and spread to more cities, this group buying snack could turn into a feast for the San Francisco company.

Spotlight has been going for four weeks now, and it features a different restaurant deal in each city every Wednesday. People can buy a $50 dining certificate for $25, and participants so far have included Gordon Ramsay at the London and I Trulli in New York and Ginger Park and Om Restaurant in Boston. Aside from the Gordon Ramsay offering, which was limited to 500 deals and sold out, both cities are selling more Spotlight deals each week.

Scott Jampol, senior director of consumer marketing at San Francisco-based Opentable, declined to share specific expectations for Spotlight, but he did allow that it has "revenue implications."

Indeed, Groupon's recent national deal with Gap Inc. proved a blockbuster: 445,000 people bought the deal for a total of $11 million. It's not clear how much of that went to Groupon and how much to Gap, but there's no question Groupon profited mightily from the deal.

Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post recently upgraded Opentable to a buy, in part because of Spotlight.

According to a report in Motley Fool, Post said that if the Spotlight pilot proves successful and expands to 20 cities by 2012, it could add $0.20 a share to Opentable's bottom line.

Of course, Opentable is by no means the only company eager to leverage its user base with group buying deals.

Yelp has quietly been testing different iterations of the model. It had a one week program called Yelp Eats in June, is now trying something called Yelp Drinks in Portland, and Venture Beat reported today that it is piloting Yelp Deals in San Diego, with plans to expand it to New York and San Francisco.

San Francisco-based Yelp's program operates more like Groupon, though, offering deals at all kinds of businesses instead of just restaurants.

Another Opentable competitor is something called Blackboard Eats, which offers dining discounts in numerous cities, including San Francisco. Its discounts do not need to be paid for in advance, which gives diners more flexibility.

Opentable's second quarter revenue grew 37 percent to $22.5 million and second quarter profits increased 273 percent to $2.6 million.

The company went public in May 2009.