

Groupon Aims to Emulate Facebook, Not Yahoo, After Walking Away From Deal - bakbak
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-06/groupon-aims-to-emulate-facebook-not-yahoo-after-walking-away-from-deal.html

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dsplittgerber
How have merchants, who participated in a Groupon deal, reacted? I hear
merchants are doing quite badly in Groupon deals and it's not what it's made
out to be in terms of immediate and/or future revenue. Any data available?

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WillyF
I just ate a delicious burger at The Counter in Chicago on a Groupon two days
ago. This is noteworthy because I bought 4 Groupons to The Counter last year.
In 2009 they sold 5,269 $15 for $30 Groupons. This year they sold 6,932 $10
for $20 Groupons (and I bought 4 again).

To me this indicates that some merchants are pretty pleased with Groupon. The
lower value Groupon offering this year is probably an attempt to turn more of
The Counter's Groupon visits profitable, since going over $20 there is a lot
easier than going over $30—especially with two people.

It's only one data point, and maybe the people at The Counter are just really
dumb, but my guess is that the first Groupon offered positive ROI, and they
expect to do even better by tweaking their latest Groupon offer.

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maukdaddy
That explains why it was so damn crowded the other day. I had no idea they had
a groupon.

For all the Chicago HNers, I highly recommend The Counter for awesome,
delicious burgers!

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nkassis
Google was ready to offer 6 billion to groupon but couldn't muster 8 billion
to buy something worthy like a cheap valued SUN?

Anyway, I guess Groupon is pushing to see how much they can get, I just
wouldn't push it too far if I was them.

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hugh3
Why would they want to buy Sun?

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nkassis
1) Patents 2) Talent 3) Java 4) hardware(not so much but they could have
killed it) , that's worth 8 billion to me and apparently to Oracle too.

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jdp23
The headline cracked me up. "BREAKING: Groupon Aims to Increase Valuation, Not
Have It Crash Miserably". The article itself is a decent roundup of what
happened after several other large non-acquisitions

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bakbak
Groupon has 2 options, either grow steadily the way they are doing it right
now OR find a new way to get visitors engaged for a long period of time rather
then just looking at the deal and go away... both the options are challenging
- for the first option competition is increasing in every local market ...
therefore it would be interesting to see how they do it if they go for second
option.

