A lot of the numbers that we want to see aren't yet available, but the ones that are make the daily deal website look pretty good
Earlier this afternoon, Groupon filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission hoping to raise $750 million and stay ahead of the competition, which Andrew Mason dismissed this week at All Things D's D9 Conference as a bunch of "copycats." A lot of the tech reports that quickly followed the filing -- it takes a while to offer anything of substance given the length of the submission -- toss around the big, impressive numbers: Groupon brought in $644 million revenue in the first three months of 2011 and sold millions of coupons to its customers from tens of thousands of merchants. But there were some numbers stuffed into the S-1 filing that weren't so impressive, too.
Despite revenue figures in the hundreds of millions for more than a year, Groupon is still bleeding money. After spending more than $200 million in marketing, with most of that going towards online advertisements, in just the first quarter of 2011, Groupon lost $103 million between January and the end of March. Since it was launched back in November 2008, Groupon has lost more than half a billion dollars.