Both Livingsocial and Groupon have lots of work ahead. They cover a large demographic which they need to partition and customize.<p>If the deal I get in the morning isn't interesting to me, they failed. Ie: both services will regularly email deals about SPAs and hot stone masages, I would not expect many men to be interested by that deal.
Good strategy, investing less than 1/25th of the money (as Google is considering) in a competitor of Groupon. I guess that Amazon has little chance of loosing money on this investment since LivingSocial is making money and this business space will grow.
$500 million revenues - is that their commission or is it the total amount they intend to bring in (including commission and sales) - there's a huge difference between the two. Assuming $500 mill is their total sales and their commission is 50%, this brings their 'actual' revenues to $250 mill - not a tiny amount, but not nearly $500 mill as well.
These guys are building real businesses with revenue growing super fast. The beauty here is they saw a great business, Groupon, duplicated and raised bunch of money to grab market share.