If you haven’t heard much about Coupons.com Inc. in the past, you’re not alone.

The 13-year-old company was founded by Steven Boal, a former Wall Street technology executive, who discerned that the newspaper coupon business could be reinvented online and has since quietly built a global business valued at $1 billion.

Ranked as the 39th most trafficked site in the United States, Coupons.com lets visitors find a wealth of coupons for everything from yogurt to dog food, and also offers white-label platforms for other coupon-issuing companies. But the next frontier is social, and the company says it has found a way to get coupons onto Facebook faster than ever—within 48 hours—through a new platform announced today called Brandcaster Social.

“What Brandcaster Social does is embed the coupon within the Facebook pages of the brand,” Steven Boal, founder and CEO of Coupons.com Inc. told Portfolio.com. “It’s very easy to set up. The consumer comes to your fan page, they like your page, it says ‘click here’ to get your coupon, and you get your coupon.”

If the company runs out of coupons, as sometimes happens since such discounts will be limited, then the user would automatically get a message that they’ll be among the first in line for the next round of coupons.

The beauty of it, says Boal, is that users don’t leave Facebook for their coupons, and companies can avoid having Web developers program the coupons within Facebook, which is time-consuming. They can also track likes for their company and the coupon, find out how many new fans were generated from the coupon via fans who shared the deal with their friends.

Several brands have already used the application, including Energizer, whose coupon campaign resulted in 60,000 likes, which in two days increased its fan base by 40 percent. The company also had 75,000 coupon prints in two days, which included 25,000 friends of fans.

Boal, who is 46, founded Coupons.com after his father-in-law, a Sunday newspaper coupon clipper shared the ins and outs of getting the best deal. That inspired him to figure out how to bring that experience online. In 1999, the coupons in the Sunday paper had a 1.6 percent redemption rate, which was already pretty low. It has now sunk even further to a 0.6 percent rate as more readers go online. Coupons.com has an average redemption rate of 19 percent, according to Boal, who says the newspaper coupon system was a broken model.

The company, which makes revenues by issuing coupons on behalf of companies such as food manufacturers, is expected to generate $100 million in revenue this year up from $60 million last year and $40 million the year before. With companies in the discount sphere, such as Groupon, gaining attention from investors, Coupons.com has also basked in the warmth of investors suddenly smitten with frugality.

Coupons.com received $200 million in funding in June, and more recently another $36 million from Greylock Partners. That has brought the company's valuation to $1 billion, but if Boal is less known that Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, he doesn’t seem to mind.

“Our reason for being has been out of the conversion of the offline base to digital,” Boal said. “We never felt it was important to beat our chests.”

Which leads to the question: Does Boal plan to take the company public, a la Groupon?

“A public path is certainly something that we’ve considered as a company, and raising the money hasn’t altered that,” Boal says. In the meantime, the company is doing well despite the recession and it’s taking advantage of the new cheap chic mentality.

“We do well when times are tough because consumers want to save money,” Boal says. "When times are good, we do well because we’re digitally focused, and as it’s been said, frugal is the new black.”

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com