Th3 Core

I have a comrade who is in the coupon and discount space...there is *big* money in this niche.

Would be one of yahoo's best buys

It would be one that might actually make money. Groupon takes a pretty big chunk from the merchants. Looking at some of the recent Groupons for some cities I would guess they average 800-1000 sales a day per market. If they make $10-20 average per sale? Could be a big cash cow assuming they know how to keep their overhead down.

But I still don't see 3-4 billion there yet. It would still be a speculative purchase based on future growth which has burned Yahoo on a lot of their acquisitions.

Aaron just launched a nice infographic displaying Yahoo brilliance over the years:

http://www.scores.org/graphics/yahoo/

They aren't buying the revenues, they are buying the user relationship data. Who refers who, and for what products, in what locations. It's cleaner data than FBs (by a country mile), and already commercialised. Whats not to love?

As a side issue, I see people talking about FBs 500m users. No. FB has like, 100m users, and 400m bots and fake profiles (ok, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but you get my point). I know for certain that the hot, blond, bisexual chick I'm "friends" with, is actually a fat bloke  . Most of "her" friends have no clue