Arrington got some inside information about LivingSocial from someone involved directly or indirectly with the all-stock $3 million acquisition SocialMedia. Doing some math from the data he saw, Arrington estimates that LivingSocial is now valued at $2.9 billion and that its revenues will be roughly $1 billion in 2011.
This $1 billion number was already out there and so were the valuation estimates. However Arrington’s numbers offer more confirmation of these earlier figures.
Groupon’s 2010 revenues were $760 million. They’re on track to be $1.2 to $1.5 billion this year. Local Offer Network previously estimated that the entire segment would be worth $2.67 billion in 2011.
The lion’s share of that money, assuming the forecast is correct, would be Groupon and LivingSocial.
In addition LivingSocial has reportedly had enormous success with its new real-time deals feature (“Instant Deals”) which has beat a comparable offering from Groupon (“Groupon Now”) to market.
Real-time offers is one of the “evolutionary paths” of daily deals. The question is how widespread would merchant participation be. But clearly there’s merchant interest in this sort of “inventory management.”
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April 18th, 2011 at 9:58 am
[...] companies, like LivingSocial seem to have found a way to access local ad revenue and are already on track to reach a $1 billion of revenue for [...]