The Google-Groupon acquisition rumors are coming in hot and heavy now. The day began with a rumored price of $2.5 billion, which was way too low. Now it ends with a more likely price somewhere between $5 billion or $6 billion. Whatever the price, it will likely be Google's largest acquisition ever if it goes through (beating out DoubleClick's $3.1 billion, and certainly YouTube's $1.65 billion price tags).
But why is Google even interested in Groupon? It is essentially an e-commerce site, bringing consumers daily deals from local and national merchants. Google doesn't do e-commerce very well (although it is trying through sexier product search). Buying Groupon would be a very risky $5 billion bet for Google in an unproven area outside its sweet spot of search I won't even get into valuation, which at $5 billion would be somewhere in the neighborhood of ten times whispered revenue run-rate of $500 million. But Groupon is the clear market leader in the fastest growing new category on the Internet, and Google seems willing to pay whatever it takes to buy market leadership. As one CEO in the local commerce industry put it to me on Monday, "I think the way Google will evolve is they will want to control everything significant on the Internet."
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