New $2 Billion Performance Marketing Company by Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book, December 8, 2010 Which new performance marketing company is set to do $2 Billion in revenues this year? Which one has just signed distribution deals with Yahoo, eBay and Ning? And which one has just signed a deal with mobile network JiWire to present hyper-local offers to 30 million users a month? Here’s a clue: the answer to all three questions is the same. One company – but which one? The answer is Groupon.And make no mistake, Groupon is a pay-for-performance company. It’s showing the way forward for all of us that have been struggling to find ways to grow the industry and make it more credible for major brands. Every deal that Groupon presents to its users is essentially a coupon for a local business, and local business advertising is huge – many times larger than the entire online marketing industry is right now. Think about the combined revenues of local newspapers, billboards, Yellow Pages-style directories and Craigslist. And then add in local TV and radio advertising. Put it all together and that’s the ad budget that Groupon and it’s various competitors are going after. They’ve taken a massive non-performance based marketing sector and turned it into a pay-per-performance juggernaut. In the space of a week, we have learned that Groupon is generating $2 Billion a year in revenues; is running 200 offers a day; and has brand-new distribution deals with eBay, Yahoo and Ning. Oh, and they’ve also inked a deal to present hyper-local offers across WiFi networks in 60 airports and 40 cities; and have a new self-serve platform for local merchants to use in creating compelling offers to new customers. To boil it down: they have so much confidence in what they’re doing that they last week rejected a $6 Billion acquisition offer from Google. Think about that: they turned down $6 Billion. Who said performance marketing wasn’t growing? Filed under: Revenue About the Author Chris Trayhorn, Publisher of mThink Blue Book Chris Trayhorn is the Chairman of the Performance Marketing Industry Blue Ribbon Panel and the CEO of mThink.com, a leading online and content marketing agency. He has founded four successful marketing companies in London and San Francisco in the last 15 years, and is currently the founder and publisher of Revenue+Performance magazine, the magazine of the performance marketing industry since 2002.