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Groupon has a great network effect. They have 25MM users and tens of thousands of local businesses. It's not as good of a moat as FB but still damn nice.

Also, I'd argue that FB has a very obvious monetization: advertising. They supposedly generate $1B+ in ad rev.

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25 million members of a mailing list is not a $6 billion defensible advantage.

But in 2005 -- or when the Y acquisition was being debated -- it wasn't obvious that fb would be able to monetize their enormous quantity of pageviews.

In any case, the enormous email list groupon has is awesome... but I think LivingSocial will be able to replicate that. And once you're on both email lists, then what does groupon have over competitors?

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