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Comment by marcusf | Hacker News Reader

So revenues up from $295m to $559m and operating income from -$146mn to $-12mn. Managing to grow revenue while narrowing the gap to black by quite a margin, good on them. I just wish they would quite re-stating the non-GAAP numbers. What value do they have beyond letting the press release have a dubious headline?

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Actually most companies and ALL analysts use non-GAAP numbers (search for your favorite company + non-gaap https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&#...)... it reflects the true nature of the business. They are also referred to as pro-forma numbers. There isn't any funny business going on here. It is good that we have GAAP so you can compare apples to apples in different industries but for a further breakdown non-GAAP numbers are very useful to an analyst.

Yeah but the non-GAAP numbers exclude customer acquisition costs (e.g. marketing). Not sure why that's excluded as marketing is a continuous and fundamental cost of doing business.

No they don't. You misunderstood what acquisition-related costs means. Acquisition related costs are costs related to acquiring another company, not acquiring a customer. It is completely standard practice to treat one-time costs like that differently.

Ok, sorry, I misunderstood. I had lingering memories of the critiques against groupons earlier non-GAAP measures [1][2][3][4][5][6] but the non-GAAP net income mostly seems to exclude stock, acquistion costs are pretty low and very clearly separated from marketing and customer acquisitions. Again, my bad.

[1] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405311190363560457647...

[2] http://www3.cfo.com/article/2012/2/banking-capital-markets_g...

[3] http://blogs.smeal.psu.edu/grumpyoldaccountants/archives/530

[4] http://www.scalefinance.com/accounting-finance-and-groupons-...

[5] http://blog.agrawals.org/2011/09/24/groupons-cost-of-revenue...

[6] http://takingpitches.com/2011/06/04/groupon-s1-ipo-marketing...

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