Groupon shuns Google's $6bn takeover bonanza Groupon walked away from acquisition talks with Google late last week, after speculative reports suggested that the world’s largest ad broker was willing to splurge up to $6bn to buy the e-commerce coupon outfit. According to the Chicago Tribune, which cited sources familiar with the matter, Groupon turned its back on Google …
Presumably Groupon, who went in my experience from "who the fuck are they?" to "as advertised on every bloody page I browse to" as soon as this buyout story started doing the rounds, will now go back to anonymity.
Just sometimes there are things that crop up that make me glad I don't have adblock. It was very interesting to see firsthand the sudden and not entirely unexpected ubiquity of Groupon which I would have been blissfully unaware of, had I that addon installed.
It must have been hard for Groupon to turn this one down with that: "But look where you could be seen....." dangled in front of them. Not that this was dangled at all of course, I'm sure that there's a perfectly reasonable and entirely less evil explanation that doesn't involve Google gaming their own ad system to suit themselves here.
Groupon is going to have to change or they will fail.
Right now they have some suckers willing to cough up a whole lot for the rights to
sell things at a small percentage and keep an even smaller one. As time goes on, someone
will come up with their own site and offer the same service for less.
It's like those coupon books they used to push hard. They got people to pay for the right to
include their coupons in a coupon book, then they also managed to get people to buy the
coupon books. Thing is, I don't see them around anymore since it did not make enough
sense to either the potential customers or the businesses.
They must have a heck of a salesforce to convince businesses to let groupon keep 50% of
the sales AFTER the price was already slashed. The only way it would make sense is if they
managed to develop a significant percentage into long term customers or if they were so
overpriced to begin with that they at least break even after getting perhaps 25% of the list
price.
So, while groupon looks a bit juicy with their cash flow (I have no idea what their costs and debts are) it would be far cheaper to simply create their own site, offer it for a less evil piece
of the action, which would likely drive enough traffic to make more profit anyway.
They can learn from groupon and do it better.
Go ahead and pay 10-12 times real earnings (not gross sales) if you must jump into it,
otherwise be patient and build a better creation without the pitfalls from dealing with their
evil past actions.
Evil being defined as that the only company that really makes out on the deal is groupon.
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