Warren on Book Marketing, Social Media, Twitter and More: Is $6 Billion for #Groupon a Great Deal? (thanks @seosteve)

Andrew Mason, Groupon’s founder and chief executive, says his strategy is “finding the holy grail of local.”
Amplify’d from dealbook.nytimes.com
As investors fret that Google’s $6 billion bid for Groupon is too high a price to pay, new details about the company’s sales and growth suggest that it might be more like one of Groupon’s cut-rate deals.
An individual close to Groupon, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the company’s annual revenue is running in excess of $1 billion a year and its subscriber base tripled this summer, to 35 million users.
And an analyst at Barclays Capital, Douglas Anmuth, estimated in a research report released on Tuesday that sales could hit $1.5 billion in 2011.
At those levels, Google would be paying four times next year’s revenues. In contrast, the company paid $3.1 billion, or roughly 10 times sales, for DoubleClick in 2007. It bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, when the online video hub was making less than $11 million a year, according to a company filing.
See more at dealbook.nytimes.com