ATD is reporting that Google is offering well more than twice what had been previously offered – $6 billion, instead of $2.5 billion. That sounds more like it. As I wrote yesterday, $2.5 billion sounded very low for this particular asset. (And this from the guy who thought YouTube was overpriced.)
Clearly, that leak to Vator.tv last weekend was timed to push a deal point, I’m guessing.
Key to this deal is Marissa Mayer, who recently took over local for Google and was promoted to boot. This would be her defining deal, and the integration of the acquisition would be critical. Google has had mixed results in this department so far – YouTube is clearly on its way to being a winner, but took far too long to get there. Many small pickups have proven to be big winners – Applied Semantics comes to mind. And Blogger, FeedBurner, and many other small acquisitions never really found their footing, but DoubelClick was a huge win.
Investors have already written off Google’s proposed investment in Groupon. GOOG is now down over $6b in market cap since this rumor came to the surface. For GOOG to retain value, it needs to return to the core business.
Have you heard this news?
http://news.linked.in/1665/european-union-to-investigate-google-propaganda-machine-aka-search-engine-maybe-its-time-to-switch-to-wikileaks
I think maybe Google will no longer be able to promote its own properties as easily as it has been able to do.
Although I would have hoped that it might be possible to educate people hot to search for information, I think the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) are in fact too stupid to understand the problems raised by getting all of your information from one source (even in Germany, a country which has historically had a rather haunting experience with information monopolies, also has a large population of naive noobs who have no worries at all with so-called “behaviorally targeted” results).
But it certainly does look like Google’s high hopes for growth outside of the United States may actually lead to more investigations into how it uses its search engine (google.com) to promote it’s other businesses (e.g. youtube.com, the chrome browser, email services, personal data mining, etc.).
It might be interesting to do some more in depth calculations. I have not used GroupOn, and I don’t know how many users they have (let alone whether they have any significant amount of users outside of the United States). I would definitely advise GroupOn to cash out at that price — Google seems to be very willing to pay top dollar for a more / less meaningless brand name.
I still think CBS made the smartest acquisition of the past 5 years when they acquired the CNet portfolio. I think the people who have enough brains to listen and get in on the Wisdom of the Language will be the ones to hit the home runs in Web 3.0.
;)nmw
Youtube on its way to being a winner? Took too long to get there? Dominating the online video market is indeed a winner. Unless they seriously screw up, they are there to stay. How 3-4 years is a long time to being the largest video siite on the planet is beyond me. I remember when Youtube was still owned by “Chad and Steve” Goodmorning America was playing the “Youtube clip of the day”. When your site is part of a major news network’s daiily content, um…you made it. When Google shows tweets in search results…you made it. When almost every site you see has facebook connect or a like button, you made it.
I tried Groupon for a bit, but I wasn’t happy with any of the offers being made. Maybe it is more of a U.S. thing (I am Canadian). However, I can see, and you heard it here first, that if and when Google acquire Groupon, the next thing you will see under a search result, will be the regionalized, Groupon deal of the day, relative to your search term. Advertisers will bid and pay like Adwords for that prime real estate. Google will make that investment back within 5-10 years.
yeah … maybe Google really needs to increase its total investment in the proposal submitted to the Groupon to be able to raise the value
Had more than a few groupon businesses complain at our website. It’s interesting that Google takes over a company that hasn’t quite figured out how to keep everyone happy. Deals sounds great for everyone, but many small to medium sized businesses just aren’t seeing the benefit to their bottom line. Can the large corporations carry groupon? Not with those margins…
That seems to be an extremely large amount of cash for Groupon.
One problem Groupon faces are the clone scripts which enables anyone to set up a Groupon clone. Well, at least this is what I see happening in Brazil, where these clones are being created every day. Probably this happens in other countries too.