Why Groupon could be bigger than Google

ryanwaggoner.com

3 pointsryanwaggoner2 comments

I have my doubts. One main criticism of Groupon and other daily deal companies is that their business is much less defensible. Aside from the size of their email lists, there's no reason a small business shouldn't go run their daily deal on another competing site. In that case, it comes down to how many users Groupon can get the deal in front of. With their daily email, they can get one page view per day per user. Google gets 10-1000 page views per day per user because of their search and display business, and has one of the largest reaches of any Internet company.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Groupon is going to fail. I think they're going to be worth a bunch of money in a year or two. I just think they're going to get a much lesser share of the daily deal market than Google has of search/search-advertising. Right now they have a huge percentage, but I think that's going to fall and stunt their growth.

Groupon is growing faster than Google was

I don't see how you can compare growth rates from two different time periods when they deal with a medium that has basically just formed. Just think if there was no "Google" until last year...what would the growth rate be today?

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