While no one has ever doubted Groupon’s impressive topline growth – the question has always been around the defensibility of a business that has so few barriers to entry. In its long awaited S-1, it’s clear that Groupon has impressive topline growth. However, when looking at its oldest markets, it appears that their business model is [...]

Analogies to mature markets are useful in predicting how new ones will evolve. One framework I like for Daily Deals is how the display ad technology landscape* shaped up. A friend of mine, Paul Knegten, pointed me to a famous slide by investment banker Terence Kawaja that details the many layers formed over time in the display ad market. The [...]

We were all surprised to see Groupon’s US revenue decline 30% in February, but apparently that’s just the beginning. Yipit, as a daily deal aggregator, indexes offers from more than 400 services, including Groupon and LivingSocial. We ran some numbers from our database, and it turns out Groupon is having an even worse March than [...]

At the beginning of December, Groupon announced two radical new features: Groupon Stores and the Deal Feed, the former a self-serve deal platform for merchants, the latter a Facebook-like experience for Groupon users. The announcement was very well received: some hailed “Groupon 2.0″ as the future of commerce. True, the potential strategic benefit of the new [...]

A North Carolina State ethics subcommittee has proposed an opinion stating that is not ethical for lawyers to offer their services via Groupon according to the ABA Journal. The opinion states that a lawyer is not allowed to share a fee with a nonlawyer, which in this case is Groupon, according to an Oyez column [...]

Five months ago, Travelzoo, an old internet 1.0 company, decided to expand their business by launching a Groupon competitor. In September, Travelzoo Launched a Groupon Competitor They have always been known for sending a weekly email with travel deals to their 21+ million subscribers. Why not try to send their subscribes some of these local [...]

A major concern for Daily Deal space is whether deal promotions are profitable for individual merchants. The argument being: if the average discount is 50+%, and the Daily Deal service takes 30-50% in commissions, then how can a merchant possibly earn a profit afterwards? A Rice University study attempted to provide an academic approach to [...]

Update on Prediction #2: Groupon is confirmed to run pregame spots on Super Bowl XLV. The company attempted to purchase game spots, but the  inventory was already sold out (AdAge). Ahh predictions posts, truly a misalignment of incentives: the only ones worth reading are the most outlandish. Fortunately, we’re writing about the Daily Deal space, [...]

Thrillist has started quitely testing a new daily deals product called Thrillist Rewards in New York City. They will now join DailyCandy, Fresh Guide, Vital Juice Daily and UrbanDaddy as daily email newsletters which have launched a deal product to their existing email lists in the last six months. Since Thrillist’s audience consists of urban, [...]

I’ll start by saying that, yes, $6 billion is a lot of money. It would be Google’s largest acquisition ever and a complete grand slam for Groupon, its employees and its investors. Why Sell Now? On the other hand, why would they sell now? Groupon is killing it like no one other company has ever killed [...]