Groupon Revenue Hits $645M in Q1

Groupon’s IPO filing today may or may not signal that the digital deals niche has jumped the shark, but the Chicago-based company's newly released numbers could get hungry Wall Street investors circling.

From a bevy of staggering statistics, a quick fact: Groupon skyrocketed from roughly 150,000 subscribers to 83 million in less than two years. It had around 50 million subscribers at the start of this year.

At the end of Q1, it counted nearly 57,000 merchants as partners. Twenty-eight million "Groupons" - or deals - were sold in the first quarter, earning almost $644.7 million in revenue.

But, the deals firm lost $102.7 million in Q1, as it spent a whopping $179.5 million on online marketing. It totaled $245 million worth of Internet advertising purchases during all of 2010.

Groupon spent $34.8 million on acquisitions last year, not including the purchase of European deals site CityDeal and Japanese player QPod. To illustrate how acquisitions have helped fuel the company's overall user base, it picked up roughly 1 million subscribers from CityDeal.

An interesting piece of data mentioned in the IPO about Groupon's much-ballyhooed Gap deal from last summer: "As an example, on August 19, 2010, we emailed and posted a Groupon daily deal offering $50 of apparel at Gap for $25 to 9.2 million subscribers across 85 markets in North America. We sold approximately 433,000 Groupons in 24 hours, generating over $10.8 million in revenue. Of the consumers who purchased Groupons, approximately 200,000 were new subscribers."

Groupon has raised $1.12 billion in venture funding, and it had $208.7 million in cash on March 31. The IPO filing states that the average revenue for each sales rep per month was $172,000.

Andrew Mason, the humor-minded Groupon CEO who OK'd the company's poorly-received Super Bowl commercials, supplied the following statement in the IPO: "We want the time people spend with Groupon to be memorable. Life is too short to be a boring company. Whether it's with a deal for something unusual, such as fire dancing classes, or a marketing campaign such as Grouspawn, we seek to create experiences for our customers that make today different enough from yesterday to justify getting out of bed."