Yipit also sells that aggregated data to various institutions (http://yipit.com/data/). Their pricing plans [0] suggest they make a non-trivial amount of revenue from selling this data.
The people willing to pay $10k/month for data are hedgefunds planning to trade shares of Groupon. With the Groupon IPO postponed, it may be hard to retain and attract new subscribers.
Sure, that $10k figure is steep. However, I'm sure there are non-trivial amount of daily deal execs, VCs, and tech analysts who would gladly pay $2k/month to understand the competitive daily deal space.
What about Groupon paying 10k/month for data on what other deal sites are doing? How much interest there is in, say, food+bar deals would seem to be fairly valuable to their sales force...
[0] http://yipit.com/data/pricing/
EDIT: See vacanti's reply down there.