At the time, reports were that Google was offering $5.3 billion with $700 million in earnouts based on performance. Google was obviously front-loading the deal so performance wasn't as big of an issue. Google just wanted to get their paws on Groupon's network of relationships with local merchants. I imagined Google pushing local deals through adwords, or complementing the inbox deals with Gmail ads, or targeted deal commercial prerolls on YouTube videos. I bet Google didn't really care about how they performed, because they wouldn't need to be profitable on their own inside Google, they'd just need to drive more ad traffic across all properties.
