Rightly or wrongly, Groupon is a cash-cow. If they're making $50m/month, given the profit margins (which must be high given that revs are 50% of inventory value

Rightly or wrongly, Groupon is a cash-cow. If they're making $50m/month, given the profit margins (which must be high given that revs are 50% of inventory value which they don't even have to buy/manage/warehouse/distribute!) $5bn doesn't seem too bad. It's a solid multi-national brand with proven scalability, and I'm guessing Google see plenty of more room to expand: given that a large %age of the internet uses Google services, and given all that Google know about their users, they can efficiently and accurately market to a huge number of people. Plus that reach means they can easily defend against competition. So yeah, I reckon this is a pretty solid deal for them.