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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is fun, but Amazon and Walmart's revenue are sort of misleading, since they obviously don't get to keep most of it.

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One could argue that personal income is also a kind of "revenue", since much of it is spent on taxes, cost of living, etc. I think the two are analogous.

Say I was a freelance salesman. I buy and sell expensive things that I can't afford. I line up the deal and make it happen. This month it's a cruise ship. It costs $500 million from the manufacturer in Amsterdam, but I can get a client in Dubai to pay $504 million delivered. I get a short term-loan which costs me $200k, plus short-term insurance for $400k. I buy the boat where it is for asking price, and pay $2.7mil to deliver it to the customer.

I made $700k on the deal, not bad. I moved more than half a billion. The _revenue_ number is huge but mostly irrelevant from my personal perspective. Almost all of it was money that was never mine, that I never made.

Yeah, your example stretches my analogy far past its breaking point. You’re right, revenue can be a pretty meaningless number. But where costs are relatively fixed, it can be helpful.

In the case of companies, it can also show how much of the market a company has captured (when revenue == sales).

Owning technology and infrastructure is not liquid, is that what you are saying? Or are you talking about operating costs?

I believe they are talking about the cost of the goods that Amazon and Walmart sells, and suggesting that instead of showing revenue numbers the site should show profit numbers (which are much lower)

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