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Comment by georgieporgie | Hacker News Reader

Is Groupon's revenue sustainable? I thought companies were complaining that they lost money by participating, which would indicate to me that it's not sustainable business.

I'm highly skeptical of Zynga because I haven't seen any evidence that they can innovate at all. I suspect people will tire of grind games, and I wonder if Zynga will be able to adapt. Maybe that's just my wishful thinking, that my family will abandon its addiction...

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>Is Groupon's revenue sustainable? I thought companies were complaining that they lost money by participating, which would indicate to me that it's not sustainable business.

Someone wrote a bad article with worse graphs showing that 40% of people did not make more money while the promotion was going on. It had horrible methodology, and didn't even point out the food service business loses money on MOST things it does, and this is actually a very small rate of loss for "things you can do to boost sales".

[Not associated with nor have I ever used groupon]

I'm pretty sure there was a figure floating around that suggested >60% of businesses who participated in Groupon ended up more profitable. That being said thats a pretty good gamble -- having a 60% chance shot at higher revenues.

I'll update this with a link if I find the article again.

Source: http://bit.ly/dChtxz

"I thought companies were complaining that they lost money by participating [in Groupon], which would indicate to me that it's not sustainable business."

Or it could indicate that for some companies, Groupon doesn't work. You can't really make a generalization out of that.

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