recently sold at a fire sale price<\/a> to Gilt), it’s become obvious that it’s no longer a challenge that can be overcome by buying or acquiring to growth.<\/p>\nGroupon is probably nearing the top of their hockey stick growth – blame it on everything from competition to deal fatigue, but the fact is that they grew faster in 3 years than some companies have in 30. Percentage wise, they aren’t growing like they once were, but you can’t discount the fact that they’re still growing on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales. \u00c2\u00a0And those much maligned marketing expenses? They may have taken away from profits, but they also created a barrier to entry significant enough that only one other company has been able to truly compete thus far.<\/p>\n
While smaller players will undoubtedly carve out a niche and see some success with group buying, Groupon has become the 800 lb. gorilla of local\/small business advertising. A few monkeys, who have a fraction of their attention and an even smaller fraction of their resources, on their back may slow them down, but won’t be what brings them down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Groupon’s run up to its IPO this morning has been over a pretty bumpy road. In spite of setbacks and plenty of negative opinion, there’s one reason it’s still worth the hype.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6840],"tags":[1845,4887,5763,1687],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21676"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21676"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21680,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21676\/revisions\/21680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/198.46.88.49\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}