Internet, Deals | featured news

Andrew Mason isn’t leaving Groupon empty handed... One thing is crystal clear already: Mason has a tidy nest egg — roughly $260 million — to spend on whatever tropical island he may hit to nurse his wounds, or to splurge on the fat camp he referenced in a letter to employees.

Groupon lost more than a fifth of its value in early trading after reporting a quarterly loss late Wednesday that fueled criticism of the daily-deals site's aggressive growth strategy.

Black Friday is a distant memory. Small Business Saturday is long gone. Now, it's Cyber Monday's turn. Cyber Monday, coined in 2005 by a shopping trade group that noticed a spike in online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving when people returned to their work computers, is the next in a line of days that stores are counting on to jumpstart the holiday shopping season.

Groupon Inc reported a quarterly net loss Wednesday as the largest daily deal company recorded higher taxes overseas.

Daily deal distributor LivingSocial doled out $142.9 million in equity as part of its agreement to buy South Korea-based discount site TicketMonster, according to a source familiar with the purchase. The District-based company, which declared the transaction in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing on Friday, has been on a buying binge in recent months as it looks to expand its global footprint through the acquisition of daily deal Web sites in overseas markets.

I wrote here at Forbes in May about the dangerous trend of unaudited numbers being used by companies, media, and investors to evaluate the potential of these IPOs... As long as they get their return before the gig is up, who cares what the real story is?

On the 25th of April Facebook's discount shopping platform Facebook Deals was unveiled and I belligerently declared Groupon as good as toast. Today Facebook announced that it will soon shutter its Facebook Deals product.

LivingSocial has picked Bank of America Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank to lead-underwrite an IPO that could value the daily deals site at $10 billion to $15 billion, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.

Compared to Groupon, which has enormous administrative costs and is hemorrhaging a lot of money, Zynga is a ruthlessly-run, well-oiled machine.

Groupon was forced to restate fourth quarter earnings, sending its stock down 6% in after-hours trading. This surprised me as much as my $2 investment in the Mega Millions jackpot not paying off.