Isn't the chart on the top of the page misleading? I think just about anyone would think on first glance that Groupon's revenue had ~tripled month-over-month.
The chart at the top of the article is just obnoxiously bad. I don't even understand what they are trying to accomplish with it, except make up for their prior error somehow.
I have to say that every TC article that ends up on here is very boring. It usually contains one Tweet's worth of information and the rest is somehow meant to make a big deal of that little nugget. On top of that the nugget is usually quite mundane, like "is Facebook overvalued?" or "Twitter is big".
Groupon, by the nature of it's business takes in a lot of revenue. But it doesn't keep most of it. Much of that money is paid out to the business running the promotion. Maybe someone else knows the approximate split?
Revenue has some bearing on Groupon's ability to generate profit, but revenue is a vanity metric.
I agree. They could be making $100 million in revenue a month but if it costs them $95 million to make that then a $21 billion valuation seems crazy on a company that profits $5 million a month.
No offense, thinking about it is fun, but we're not exactly accountants; and we're definitely not accountants with access to Groupon's numbers. It "seems crazy" isn't exactly a critical argument.
Don't they take a 50% cut for every coupon sold? I am sure they have other spending for salaries, offices, servers, etc.. but these things probably don't scale up (too much) with revenue, so I would think that revenue growth would be a really good indicator of profit.
