8 ms·

Groupon updates IPO filing, admits it's unprofitable

183 points by silvio 15y ago

yid 15y ago
The juice that we're all looking for: > On that basis, Groupon incurred a $420 million operating loss for 2010 and a $117.1 million loss in the first quarter. So they had a slightly worse amortized 1st quarter this year than last.
- anigbrowl 15y ago
  MarketWatch puts it succinctly: 'the bigger Groupon gets, the more it loses'. Although it's not the firm's fault, the timing of this filing amendment couldn't be worse - investors are likely to psychologically associate it with the market instability. Not that I'm qualified to dispense investment advice or anything, but my bet is that this offering will either be under-subscribed or the firm will end up under-capitalized and the founders will get ejected within a year of being listed. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-groupon-gets-the-more-it-loses-2011-08-10?reflink=MW_GoogleNews http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-groupon-gets-the...
- hvs 15y ago
  No worries: We exclude those costs because, unlike our other marketing expenses, they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes See? Once they acquire all of their subscribers, they will never have to acquire subscribers again. Then they can just rake in the dough.
  - ZoFreX 15y ago
    I'm surprised so few people are familiar with the "land grab", it seems to me that's what they are attempting. In the early days Amazon was spending something like $20 on average per customer acquired and was losing money hand over fist. That's not to say I think Groupon will be the next Amazon: This is a risky strategy. But it can pay off massively if you cement yourself as the only big player in an emerging market.
    - hvs 15y ago
      The differences are that 1) Amazon was selling a tangible commodity and 2) they weren't doing it at the expense of the other side of the transaction (i.e. the companies Groupon is selling coupons for). That isn't to say that they won't find a happy medium where they can balance the need for their customers to get massive discounts without pissing off the businesses, but I'm having trouble seeing it.
    - r00fus 15y ago
      A land grab only makes sense if you have constructed or inherited barriers to entry... what are their barriers? They're grabbing land that will be stolen the next day from them by LivingSocial or Google Offers...
      - jonnathanson 15y ago
        Exactly. Amazon's acquired land was defensible, so to speak. Once it acquired a customer, that customer was likely to stick around. As the numbers show, Groupon can only get 20% of all first time users to buy something. And yet, it counts all prospects as "customers." And even for those who do buy a groupon or two, what reason would they have to stay loyal to Groupon? At best, Groupon is poised to become one of many big commodity providers in this market. (Speaking of Amazon, btw, what's to stop them from getting into this market eventually?)
        namityadav 15y ago
        Amazon's acquired land was defensible, so to speak. Once it acquired a customer, that customer was likely to stick around Why?
        robryan 15y ago
        Because they built up a heap of infrastructure required to consistently offer some of the best prices for goods online. Competitors could only really compete in niches because the startup costs to get to amazons scale would be massive. With group deals, all someone has to do is setup a basic website and start calling up companies to find better deals than Groupon is offering, the customer doesn't care which deals site is offering a deal as you can signup to a new one in about 5 minutes. With the deals site I've found aggregators to be more useful than the individual sites as the one which has the deal doesn't matter much. If I was looking for a book I wouldn't worry about an aggregator but head straight to Amazon or Book Depository which is also now Amazon owned.
  - Cushman 15y ago
    Well, it's plausible, right? The users they have will stick around, and if they stop spending so much on customer acquisition they might be able to reduce their cut and make a profit, meaning even better deals. It could happen. Or does this not pass the sniff test for some reason I'm missing?
    - hvs 15y ago
      I'm no longer a customer of Groupon. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but I don't know of any company where customer acquisition isn't a major cost. The traditional business school number touted is that is costs 10 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to maintain an existing customer. EDIT: I know I may have counteracted my own argument, but my point was that customers are expensive, and the costs don't go away, even if they lessen.
      - spanktheuser 15y ago
        If you look at many subscription-based businesses (newspapers, cable providers, mobile voice/data companies), you'll often see businesses where the cost of acquisition is pretty low compared to the life-time value of a customer. Newspapers (pre-Web) are a particularly good example of this - most of their costs were in production/distribution. Acquiring a customer was relatively cheap and churn relatively low. So anecdotally, there are historical business models that feature low acquisition costs & low churn.
    - arctangent 15y ago
      There will always be people who scour coupon sites for deals, even taking into account natural customer churn. It's conceivable that Groupon could be the Google on coupon hunting. However the number of coupons available isn't going to increase forever, and may well already be in decline (for some measure of businesses using Groupon compared with deals offered). This is because those businesses see Groupon as a way to infrequently attract a large number of people to try their products at a price that they would not be able to sustain for other marketing models such as advertising. The only way Groupon can "grow" is to continually reach new businesses to ensure that the number of coupons available is high. However, eventually the well will run dry.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
suking 15y ago
It has always admitted it's unprofitable - they dropped their BS accounting metric trying to show that with some magic they were making a profit. To be honest their filing reeked so bad and them trying to slip in that crap and not account for marketing expenses - I wouldn't trust their executive team at all.
- timr 15y ago
  I'm left wondering why you can still find the word "ACSOI" in the document -- it's right there in the "We don't measure ourselves in conventional ways." section of the letter to investors. They do seem to have removed the metric from other places...but is it really that hard to do a search through the document before filing with the SEC? The mind boggles.
  - suking 15y ago
    I think them using that stat in the first place is at best extreme arrogance or total cluelessness and at worst outright fraud.
puredemo 15y ago
Groupon not selling to Google was the dumbest thing I've ever seen a company do. Ever.
- hvs 15y ago
  So, does that make Google offering to buy Groupon also one of the dumbest things you've ever seen a company do?
  - mechanical_fish 15y ago
    It's relative. Google has piles of money and the means of making more; if they make a mistake in spending their pocket change, it's no biggie. But Groupon has piles of debts, and their runway is getting shorter.
  - emp_ 15y ago
    One goes be dumb and moves on, the other goes dumb and dies.
  - SoftwareMaven 15y ago
    I think Google was willing to pay way more than they should have for Groupon, but I wouldn't call it anywhere near the dumbest thing a company could do.
  - enjo 15y ago
    Speculating here, but I don't think Google wanted Groupon as an immediate profit center. They wanted their considerable mindshare and ready-made sales and marketing team. I'm guessing that they felt they could merge Googles ability to optimize with that juggernaut and build something to just dominate the local marketing space (particularly the real time stuff).
- lucasjake 15y ago
  This is pretty simplistic thinking. For all you know Groupon wanted the deal badly, Google walked away from the deal, and both parties agreed to go with the story that Groupon walked away so that it wouldn't kill their prospects of an IPO.
u48998 15y ago
Groupon=Bubble
uptown 15y ago
What I don't understand is that Google Offers has essentially mimicked the same type of "deals" that Groupon is offering ... usually NYC restaurants I've never heard of, or activities I'm not interested in. Today's offer is "$15 for a tour of the Ground Zero Museum Workshop (up to a $25 value)". So I unsubscribed. I feel like Google had/has a tremendous opportunity to do what Groupon does, but do it with offers that their users will find valuable. Instead they're just trying to recreate the same cut-rate nail salon discounts and arguably exploitive 9/11 museum "deal".
- untog 15y ago
  Well I think what you're describing there is exactly the reason Groupon isn't making a profit- they have to spend a ton of money on marketers, reaching out to businesses in order to secure deals. Google appears to not be doing that, and suffers as a result.
hullo 15y ago
One interesting number for last quarter, from total sales of $878 million, $341 million or 39% was actually Groupon's. Which definitely seems to be proof that the days of 50/50 splits are over, if any merchant prospects about to talk deal terms hadn't already gotten that memo.
int3rnaut 15y ago
It would be interesting to find out how other coupon sites with similar business models are fairing--as much as the land grab theory makes sense, I actually wonder about the current system of offering stuff I normally wouldn't want for cheap being a viable business. A little off topic but I've been noticing a lot of "TeamBuy" ads on TV (I live in Canada)--one can't help but think that until competition like that is settled there will continue to be tremendous growing pains for Groupon and company.
jcampbell1 15y ago
If you are interested in Groupon's actual performance rather than a reporter's linkbait, see the filing. I find the table on page 57 rather informative about the current state of the business. http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911007178/a2204399zs-1a.htm http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/00010474691100717...
- suking 15y ago
  Revenue per subscriber has absolutely tanked. AKA - people become stale and aren't buying so those marketing costs they were trying to hide as one time subscriber costs are going to be around forever.
  - jcampbell1 15y ago
    I think that would be revenue per customer, which has been pretty steady at around $40/customer/qtr, for the past year. The reason revenue per subscriber has dropped is because the ratio of subscribers to customers has fallen. That is a different problem that they are now signing up people who aren't really interested in buying a coupon.
    - suking 15y ago
      I'm lost at what you're saying. It clearly states revenue per subscriber has dropped off a cliff to $9.
      - jcampbell1 15y ago
        A subscriber is someone that is signed up for emails. A customer is someone that has ever made a purchase. The number of people that have made a purchase is growing, and the amount they buy per quarter has been steady at around $40 for the past year. The number of people that get the emails, but don't buy has been exploding so revenue per person on the email list has been steadily decreasing. You reached the conclusion that they will require more marketing spend based on a decreasing revenue per subscriber. I draw the opposite conclusion, that spending money to get more people to signup for the email list is probably counter productive becuase incremental customers are unlikely to purchase a groupon, and thus marketing expense should reduced. Same data, opposite conclusion.
cletus 15y ago
Groupon is a fundamentally bad business and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot cattle prod. Some say that we know they're not profitable but that's really not the point. By counting customer acquisition as an extraordinary expense they are implying that: 1. The value of that customer is AT LEAST as much the cost of acquisition; and 2. That cost also accounts for the natural loss of customers. This is shady because (IMHO) daily deals customers have very little loyalty to the providers of those services, there is no natural barrier to prevent customers moving to LivingSocial or whomever and the high margin on deal split is transitory because increased competition will reduce what is really nothing more than the artificial scarcity introduced by Groupon's one deal a day (per market). But none of that is why Groupon is a bad business (IMHO). Consider: Groupon offers a deal, people buy it and Groupon and the provider split those proceeds in some fashion. I believe--but don't know--that the provider has to wait for some large part of those proceeds too. Basically that delay is Groupon's cash flow. So what's the best outcome for Groupon and the provider? One of two things: 1. The customer doesn't use that coupon. Groupon and the provider pocket the free money; or 2. The customer spends above the coupon or is a repeat customer such that the "marketing cost" (to the provider) of the Groupon offer is amortized over multiple visits and/or higher spend such that they make a profit. In the case of (1), many providers really don't want customers to use coupons. There are plenty of anecdotes from people getting bad reactions when they tell a proprietor or a waiter or whatever that they're using a coupon, particularly in restaurants. Worse, coupon users may be people who are prepared to pay full price anyway or the influx of coupon users may prevent full-paying customers from being able to use your service. The propaganda is that you can sell unused capacity. While true for some businesses I think you'll find that many people try to use Groupons in, say, restuarants at otherwise peak or busy times. There are some success stories of (2) but plenty of failures too. What isn't built into Groupon's financial statements is account risk. There is a strong argument that a failing business can make one last roll of the dice with a Groupon offer. If they fail, they were going under anyway. I actually don't know if Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) tried to buy Groupon or not and if we did, at what price. The press reports Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer. My personal opinion is that Google dodged a huge bullet if this is true.
- samstave 15y ago
  There are many of us who have always known groupon was a bad idea. My information comes from all my friends in SF who own businesses that Groupon attempted to solicit. My friends cupcake shop in union square was asked to sell their cupcakes for 25% of retail and at a loss in a very pushy way by groupon. I have been on groupon for pretty much since they launched. I have bought in total (1) groupon. And I forgot about it and it expired. I am not interested in the things they have, which are typically things I would never frequently buy anyway (skydiving, spas etc). Thus, I have never seen it being a place I would spend much money. I haven't logged into it for nearly a year. I stopped all emails way back as well.
vaksel 15y ago
frankly with the status of the current stock market, I don't see Groupon actually doing an IPO. I mean today, the market tanked another 519 points. Everyone is busy taking their money out, not putting it in. And groupon doesn't exactly have the reputation as being a high quality IPO
caffeine5150 15y ago
I think groupon has gotten a huge boost from retailer desperation since the 2008 crash. They haven't existed in a normal economy. Not only might businesses decide they are not a good solution in hard times, but in the longer term as the economy recovers, they'll likely have less interest as well.
JangoSteve 15y ago
So, my question is, did Groupon turn down Google's acquisition offer because they knew it would probably fall through in the due diligence stage? Whereas, they could then use the hype from the offer to somewhat inflate an IPO?

183 points by silvio 15y ago

yid 15y ago

The juice that we're all looking for: > On that basis, Groupon incurred a $420 million operating loss for 2010 and a $117.1 million loss in the first quarter. So they had a slightly worse amortized 1st quarter this year than last.

anigbrowl 15y ago
MarketWatch puts it succinctly: 'the bigger Groupon gets, the more it loses'. Although it's not the firm's fault, the timing of this filing amendment couldn't be worse - investors are likely to psychologically associate it with the market instability. Not that I'm qualified to dispense investment advice or anything, but my bet is that this offering will either be under-subscribed or the firm will end up under-capitalized and the founders will get ejected within a year of being listed. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-groupon-gets-the-more-it-loses-2011-08-10?reflink=MW_GoogleNews http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-bigger-groupon-gets-the...
hvs 15y ago
No worries: We exclude those costs because, unlike our other marketing expenses, they are an up-front investment to acquire new subscribers that we expect to end when this period of rapid expansion in our subscriber base concludes See? Once they acquire all of their subscribers, they will never have to acquire subscribers again. Then they can just rake in the dough.
- ZoFreX 15y ago
  I'm surprised so few people are familiar with the "land grab", it seems to me that's what they are attempting. In the early days Amazon was spending something like $20 on average per customer acquired and was losing money hand over fist. That's not to say I think Groupon will be the next Amazon: This is a risky strategy. But it can pay off massively if you cement yourself as the only big player in an emerging market.
  - hvs 15y ago
    The differences are that 1) Amazon was selling a tangible commodity and 2) they weren't doing it at the expense of the other side of the transaction (i.e. the companies Groupon is selling coupons for). That isn't to say that they won't find a happy medium where they can balance the need for their customers to get massive discounts without pissing off the businesses, but I'm having trouble seeing it.
  - r00fus 15y ago
    A land grab only makes sense if you have constructed or inherited barriers to entry... what are their barriers? They're grabbing land that will be stolen the next day from them by LivingSocial or Google Offers...
    - jonnathanson 15y ago
      Exactly. Amazon's acquired land was defensible, so to speak. Once it acquired a customer, that customer was likely to stick around. As the numbers show, Groupon can only get 20% of all first time users to buy something. And yet, it counts all prospects as "customers." And even for those who do buy a groupon or two, what reason would they have to stay loyal to Groupon? At best, Groupon is poised to become one of many big commodity providers in this market. (Speaking of Amazon, btw, what's to stop them from getting into this market eventually?)
      - namityadav 15y ago
        Amazon's acquired land was defensible, so to speak. Once it acquired a customer, that customer was likely to stick around Why?
        robryan 15y ago
        Because they built up a heap of infrastructure required to consistently offer some of the best prices for goods online. Competitors could only really compete in niches because the startup costs to get to amazons scale would be massive. With group deals, all someone has to do is setup a basic website and start calling up companies to find better deals than Groupon is offering, the customer doesn't care which deals site is offering a deal as you can signup to a new one in about 5 minutes. With the deals site I've found aggregators to be more useful than the individual sites as the one which has the deal doesn't matter much. If I was looking for a book I wouldn't worry about an aggregator but head straight to Amazon or Book Depository which is also now Amazon owned.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Well, it's plausible, right? The users they have will stick around, and if they stop spending so much on customer acquisition they might be able to reduce their cut and make a profit, meaning even better deals. It could happen. Or does this not pass the sniff test for some reason I'm missing?
  - hvs 15y ago
    I'm no longer a customer of Groupon. The plural of "anecdote" isn't "data", but I don't know of any company where customer acquisition isn't a major cost. The traditional business school number touted is that is costs 10 times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to maintain an existing customer. EDIT: I know I may have counteracted my own argument, but my point was that customers are expensive, and the costs don't go away, even if they lessen.
    - spanktheuser 15y ago
      If you look at many subscription-based businesses (newspapers, cable providers, mobile voice/data companies), you'll often see businesses where the cost of acquisition is pretty low compared to the life-time value of a customer. Newspapers (pre-Web) are a particularly good example of this - most of their costs were in production/distribution. Acquiring a customer was relatively cheap and churn relatively low. So anecdotally, there are historical business models that feature low acquisition costs & low churn.
  - arctangent 15y ago
    There will always be people who scour coupon sites for deals, even taking into account natural customer churn. It's conceivable that Groupon could be the Google on coupon hunting. However the number of coupons available isn't going to increase forever, and may well already be in decline (for some measure of businesses using Groupon compared with deals offered). This is because those businesses see Groupon as a way to infrequently attract a large number of people to try their products at a price that they would not be able to sustain for other marketing models such as advertising. The only way Groupon can "grow" is to continually reach new businesses to ensure that the number of coupons available is high. However, eventually the well will run dry.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

suking 15y ago

It has always admitted it's unprofitable - they dropped their BS accounting metric trying to show that with some magic they were making a profit. To be honest their filing reeked so bad and them trying to slip in that crap and not account for marketing expenses - I wouldn't trust their executive team at all.

timr 15y ago
I'm left wondering why you can still find the word "ACSOI" in the document -- it's right there in the "We don't measure ourselves in conventional ways." section of the letter to investors. They do seem to have removed the metric from other places...but is it really that hard to do a search through the document before filing with the SEC? The mind boggles.
- suking 15y ago
  I think them using that stat in the first place is at best extreme arrogance or total cluelessness and at worst outright fraud.

puredemo 15y ago

Groupon not selling to Google was the dumbest thing I've ever seen a company do. Ever.

hvs 15y ago
So, does that make Google offering to buy Groupon also one of the dumbest things you've ever seen a company do?
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  It's relative. Google has piles of money and the means of making more; if they make a mistake in spending their pocket change, it's no biggie. But Groupon has piles of debts, and their runway is getting shorter.
- emp_ 15y ago
  One goes be dumb and moves on, the other goes dumb and dies.
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  I think Google was willing to pay way more than they should have for Groupon, but I wouldn't call it anywhere near the dumbest thing a company could do.
- enjo 15y ago
  Speculating here, but I don't think Google wanted Groupon as an immediate profit center. They wanted their considerable mindshare and ready-made sales and marketing team. I'm guessing that they felt they could merge Googles ability to optimize with that juggernaut and build something to just dominate the local marketing space (particularly the real time stuff).
lucasjake 15y ago
This is pretty simplistic thinking. For all you know Groupon wanted the deal badly, Google walked away from the deal, and both parties agreed to go with the story that Groupon walked away so that it wouldn't kill their prospects of an IPO.

u48998 15y ago

Groupon=Bubble

uptown 15y ago

What I don't understand is that Google Offers has essentially mimicked the same type of "deals" that Groupon is offering ... usually NYC restaurants I've never heard of, or activities I'm not interested in. Today's offer is "$15 for a tour of the Ground Zero Museum Workshop (up to a $25 value)". So I unsubscribed. I feel like Google had/has a tremendous opportunity to do what Groupon does, but do it with offers that their users will find valuable. Instead they're just trying to recreate the same cut-rate nail salon discounts and arguably exploitive 9/11 museum "deal".

untog 15y ago
Well I think what you're describing there is exactly the reason Groupon isn't making a profit- they have to spend a ton of money on marketers, reaching out to businesses in order to secure deals. Google appears to not be doing that, and suffers as a result.

hullo 15y ago

One interesting number for last quarter, from total sales of $878 million, $341 million or 39% was actually Groupon's. Which definitely seems to be proof that the days of 50/50 splits are over, if any merchant prospects about to talk deal terms hadn't already gotten that memo.

int3rnaut 15y ago

It would be interesting to find out how other coupon sites with similar business models are fairing--as much as the land grab theory makes sense, I actually wonder about the current system of offering stuff I normally wouldn't want for cheap being a viable business. A little off topic but I've been noticing a lot of "TeamBuy" ads on TV (I live in Canada)--one can't help but think that until competition like that is settled there will continue to be tremendous growing pains for Groupon and company.

jcampbell1 15y ago

If you are interested in Groupon's actual performance rather than a reporter's linkbait, see the filing. I find the table on page 57 rather informative about the current state of the business. http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/000104746911007178/a2204399zs-1a.htm http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1490281/00010474691100717...

suking 15y ago
Revenue per subscriber has absolutely tanked. AKA - people become stale and aren't buying so those marketing costs they were trying to hide as one time subscriber costs are going to be around forever.
- jcampbell1 15y ago
  I think that would be revenue per customer, which has been pretty steady at around $40/customer/qtr, for the past year. The reason revenue per subscriber has dropped is because the ratio of subscribers to customers has fallen. That is a different problem that they are now signing up people who aren't really interested in buying a coupon.
  - suking 15y ago
    I'm lost at what you're saying. It clearly states revenue per subscriber has dropped off a cliff to $9.
    - jcampbell1 15y ago
      A subscriber is someone that is signed up for emails. A customer is someone that has ever made a purchase. The number of people that have made a purchase is growing, and the amount they buy per quarter has been steady at around $40 for the past year. The number of people that get the emails, but don't buy has been exploding so revenue per person on the email list has been steadily decreasing. You reached the conclusion that they will require more marketing spend based on a decreasing revenue per subscriber. I draw the opposite conclusion, that spending money to get more people to signup for the email list is probably counter productive becuase incremental customers are unlikely to purchase a groupon, and thus marketing expense should reduced. Same data, opposite conclusion.

cletus 15y ago

Groupon is a fundamentally bad business and I wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot cattle prod. Some say that we know they're not profitable but that's really not the point. By counting customer acquisition as an extraordinary expense they are implying that: 1. The value of that customer is AT LEAST as much the cost of acquisition; and 2. That cost also accounts for the natural loss of customers. This is shady because (IMHO) daily deals customers have very little loyalty to the providers of those services, there is no natural barrier to prevent customers moving to LivingSocial or whomever and the high margin on deal split is transitory because increased competition will reduce what is really nothing more than the artificial scarcity introduced by Groupon's one deal a day (per market). But none of that is why Groupon is a bad business (IMHO). Consider: Groupon offers a deal, people buy it and Groupon and the provider split those proceeds in some fashion. I believe--but don't know--that the provider has to wait for some large part of those proceeds too. Basically that delay is Groupon's cash flow. So what's the best outcome for Groupon and the provider? One of two things: 1. The customer doesn't use that coupon. Groupon and the provider pocket the free money; or 2. The customer spends above the coupon or is a repeat customer such that the "marketing cost" (to the provider) of the Groupon offer is amortized over multiple visits and/or higher spend such that they make a profit. In the case of (1), many providers really don't want customers to use coupons. There are plenty of anecdotes from people getting bad reactions when they tell a proprietor or a waiter or whatever that they're using a coupon, particularly in restaurants. Worse, coupon users may be people who are prepared to pay full price anyway or the influx of coupon users may prevent full-paying customers from being able to use your service. The propaganda is that you can sell unused capacity. While true for some businesses I think you'll find that many people try to use Groupons in, say, restuarants at otherwise peak or busy times. There are some success stories of (2) but plenty of failures too. What isn't built into Groupon's financial statements is account risk. There is a strong argument that a failing business can make one last roll of the dice with a Groupon offer. If they fail, they were going under anyway. I actually don't know if Google (disclaimer: I work for Google) tried to buy Groupon or not and if we did, at what price. The press reports Groupon turned down a $6 billion offer. My personal opinion is that Google dodged a huge bullet if this is true.

samstave 15y ago
There are many of us who have always known groupon was a bad idea. My information comes from all my friends in SF who own businesses that Groupon attempted to solicit. My friends cupcake shop in union square was asked to sell their cupcakes for 25% of retail and at a loss in a very pushy way by groupon. I have been on groupon for pretty much since they launched. I have bought in total (1) groupon. And I forgot about it and it expired. I am not interested in the things they have, which are typically things I would never frequently buy anyway (skydiving, spas etc). Thus, I have never seen it being a place I would spend much money. I haven't logged into it for nearly a year. I stopped all emails way back as well.

vaksel 15y ago

frankly with the status of the current stock market, I don't see Groupon actually doing an IPO. I mean today, the market tanked another 519 points. Everyone is busy taking their money out, not putting it in. And groupon doesn't exactly have the reputation as being a high quality IPO

caffeine5150 15y ago

I think groupon has gotten a huge boost from retailer desperation since the 2008 crash. They haven't existed in a normal economy. Not only might businesses decide they are not a good solution in hard times, but in the longer term as the economy recovers, they'll likely have less interest as well.

JangoSteve 15y ago

So, my question is, did Groupon turn down Google's acquisition offer because they knew it would probably fall through in the due diligence stage? Whereas, they could then use the hype from the offer to somewhat inflate an IPO?