Behind Groupon’s $6 Billion Brushoff

If you believe the rumored numbers, it would have been the biggest acquisition in Internet history — and you definitely should believe the numbers. In the fall of 2010, search giant Google offered nearly $6 billion to buy Groupon, the daily-deals site that became the quickest firm to rack up $1 billion in sales and the second-quickest, behind video behemoth YouTube, to hit a $1 billion valuation.

Online acquisitions didn’t get any bigger than this.

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About Voices

Along with original content and posts from across the Dow Jones network, this section of AllThingsD includes Must-Reads From Other Web Sites — pieces we’ve read, discussions we’ve followed, stuff we like. Six posts from external sites are included here each weekday, but we only run the headlines. We link to the original sites for the rest. These posts are explicitly labeled, so it’s clear that the content comes from other Web sites, and for clarity’s sake, all outside posts run against a pink background.

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