Why are so many stories X company posts X revenue? Who cares? | Hacker News Reader

Why are so many stories X company posts X revenue? Who cares?

11 pointsRichardHeart4 comments

It seems to be that the only two parties that really care what revenue a company makes in a quarter are investors in that company or its competitors. I really, truly, do not care what your quarterly profit is, at all. Is there some reason I see these articles popping up so often on consumer tech sites, like techpowerup.com?

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There are 3 major points that I can think of:

1- these are extremely easy to write. Some blogger at (for example) just needs to copy and paste the quarterly announcement, and bam he's got his article for the day. (it's quarterly results season at the moment, which is why you're seeing so many right now).

2 - Companies like to be in the news, and reporting about their incredible results is basically free advertising. So they have incentive to feed the announcements to bloggers.

3- it's become a trend for tech watchers to 'cheer' for their favorite company, and revenue reports have become some sort of proxy for a scoreboard comparing companies. This is a thinking along the lines of "if Google makes more than Apple last quarter, that validates my preference for Android". I'm not standing behind this line of thinking but it sure seems to be a popular pastime among tech commenters.

Information bias - most people understand what revenue is and hence use this metric to judge a company. And mind you, I am not saying that revenue is irrelevant to evaluating a company. It has its place in "the bigger picture". But it is easier to boast with revenue than it is with free cash flow. Look at the recent example of Intel [0] - the company likes to push positive indicators like revenue and profitability in this case; but those "positive" developments happened because they increased prices. Which generally is not a good sign, because this usually means that demand did not grow, only that the market is willing to pay a higher price for the same good.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/0e327b06-0149-3868-acbc-e27e8a15b...

Tech companies pay PR companies (or PR professionals) to promote stories about their own success. Most news sites have an incentive to post pretty much all the content they have, as often as possible because there is a small upside in posting a story and essentially no downside. When a PR company comes to a news site with a story, the news site might as well run it.

Tech companies pay PR companies to do this to:

1) Stay in the news (brand awareness)

2) Signal strength to vendors, partners, and distributors

3) Build up good press prior to a round of investment

Sure, a few reasons: 1) If they're public they have a lot of investors and even more potential investors. 2) People like to watch competition, they like to see some things (team, companies, athletes) perform better than others. They like the horserace and horserace style articles generate clicks 3) Slow news days and media companies have to put something out.

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