livingsocial breaks out.

looking at the big 50% off a $20 amazon giftcard this morning unveils that living social sold 13,01,296 giftcards! that’s a lot of giftcards. of couse, it helps that amazon recently invested $175 million in livingsocial.

the question is which company paid for the $10 loss in this deal? according to nytimes.com livingsocial purchased the giftcards from amazon. we won’t know if it was worth it for a while, but in any case it helped get the brand name out there by having people share the deal all over twitter and facebook yesterday and thus go “viral”.

with a blockbuster deal and big investment by amazon will livingsocial finally give the industry-leader groupon a run for it’s money? well, i believe the first step is offering some great deals on an ongoing basis like groupon does. the livingsocial deals here in tampa really have been terrible so far – especially in comparison to groupon’s deals. it has gone so far that my groupon app on my iphone is in daily use while the livingsocail app is a mere afterthought.