You already know how the group buying thing has worked out for Groupon (ridiculously well), but restaurants, spas and yoga studios aren’t the only ones who find a little bit of peer pressure beneficial in driving sales.

IMVU, the creators of a virtual world where users can buy clothes and accessories for avatars, recently tested a group buying promotion for in-game currency that brought in $112,000 in 3 days. {VentureBeat} Not quite the millions of dollars that Groupon or competitors like Living Social have taken in on special national promotions, but not too bad for what amounts to pixels. Also, unlike Groupon and LivingSocial, there aren’t any physical products to deal with at any point so the profit margins on those promotions are probably quite impressive.

Virtual currency purchases amount to $40 million a year for IMVU. The company has 6 million items in its virtual catalog, and 7,000 user generated items are added every day.

We don’t doubt the power of a group buy or time limit in prompting people to spend money (the time limiting has worked well for Gilt, Hautelook and other sample sale sites), but do have to wonder if the promotion would have worked just as well without the group component. The first group buying deal was for 50% off the price of 200,000 credits if 300 people signed up. The discounted price was $99, and in the end more than 1100 users signed up.

From the VentureBeat post, it isn’t clear if the limited time 50% off promotion had been tried before without the group component. It’s doubtful that it hurt anything, but limited availability + saving money isn’t exactly a new discovery. If we had to guess, we’d put our money behind those two things making the promotion successful rather than the power of the crowd.

Either way, let’s give a “well played” to IMVU for coming up with a fresh spin on a somewhat established promotional tactic.

The 24-hour deal, which runs today, offers LivingSocial members a $20 Amazon giftcard for $10.

TechCrunch notes that it’s unlikely most people will spend exactly $20, which would make it a winner for Amazon. Add to that, a $10 discount isn’t steep enough to really cut into margins on most products and is probably about the amount most online retailers calculate when offering free shipping and it’s a no-brainer for Amazon. For the math portion of this post: of the $10, Amazon probably only sees $5 since the split on most group buying deals is 50%, but with Amazon being a major investor the margins could be more favorable. Even if they aren’t, we repeat the major investor portion of the statement for why this is a no lose situation for Amazon.

As for LivingSocial, the Amazon investment obviously helps in bending some of Amazon’s rules. Most affiliate promoters of Amazon products are restricted when it comes to offering any incentives or cash back promotions, putting up a barrier that would be harder for copycats to overcome. Also, it’s worth remembering that Groupon’s Gap promotion where people got $50 credits for $25 was the company’s most successful and brought in $11 million in a single day.

While the majority of the daily deals on any site are targeted to specific local markets, the power of a national promotion with a major brand is still the kind of thing that gets attention after one too many spa or yoga class discount offerings. With the sheer amount of stuff on Amazon, the low purchase amount and the fact that you really aren’t likely to see the deal anywhere else, we wouldn’t be surprised to see LivingSocial having a multi-million dollar day of their own today.

With 14 hours to go, nearly 850,000 gift cards have already been sold putting the total revenue close to $8.5 million. Figuring that they can continue to average 85,000 cards per hour (!), you’re looking at about 2 million cards sold or $20 million.

Groupon for one, please.

For $6 billion, this site would be sold in a nanosecond (possibly with a kidney included), but Groupon looked the multi-billion dollar offer in the face and decided to walk away. Chicago Breaking Business {via TechCrunch} reports that two sources close to the deal have confirmed that Groupon has decided to stay independent, possibly in advance of a IPO filing, though a decision on that won’t come until 2011.

How could anyone possibly walk away from $6 billion? According to Kara Swisher at AllThingsD, the $500 million annual revenues that everyone’s been tossing around (including us) are actually closer to $2 billion. While that figure doesn’t take into consideration what Groupon pays out to merchants, most estimates have Groupon taking a 50% cut of each deal that passes through its site, which means the company could be seeing $1 billion from the deals that pass through their system. Considering this is still in a span of just 2 years, heading for an IPO might make more sense. With their own focus on acquisitions – of both smaller companies outside the US and new customers – Groupon hasn’t been resting on their first to market status to grow, and it’s obviously working out amazingly well. If they hit $3 billion in revenue next year, an IPO could easily see the company valued at much more than the $6 billion Google offered.

Only time will tell if this is the right move: when Facebook turned down a $2 billion offer from Yahoo!, many observers who’d seen Friendster’s rise and fall thought it was a risky move. Today the company is valued somewhere close to $50 billion and it looks like the right bet. As successful as they’ve been, it’s still impossible to know for sure if Facebook will continue to hold the number one social network spot that MySpace once held, and officially conceded. For Groupon, the loudest criticisms of their multi-billion dollar valuation have been over the fact that the model can be easily duplicated, and that there’s not much that would keep someone loyal to Groupon exclusively.

While they may not be the only daily deal site that customers keep up with, Groupon is quickly turning the space into a winner take most market and sometimes that’s enough to build a defensible business on. The momentum Groupon has going for them at the moment may be a challenge to sustain, but it would be an even tougher battle for competing companies to overtake them.

Meanwhile, this puts Google back to square one. Amazon recently offered competitor LivingSocial $175 million, BuyWithMe is the next largest competitor, but not in enough cities for Google to spend money on an acquisition rather than trying to build its own product and sales force. Will we see Google Deals/Goopons making their way into local listings? Google branded products have been hit (Maps, Earthview, Gmail, News) and miss (Video, Buzz, Wave, Froogle, Base) so it’s difficult to say how they’ll move forward, but we can’t see them walking away from the  daily deal model after what was on the table.