Revenue per subscriber has absolutely tanked. AKA - people become stale and aren't buying so those marketing costs they were trying to hide as one time subscriber costs are going to be around forever.
I think that would be revenue per customer, which has been pretty steady at around $40/customer/qtr, for the past year. The reason revenue per subscriber has dropped is because the ratio of subscribers to customers has fallen. That is a different problem that they are now signing up people who aren't really interested in buying a coupon.
Actually - I think if that is their problem it would be easier. Just stop marketing... new customers aren't worth anything. I, however, think it IS the new customers bringing in the revenue and the old customers not buying anything. They need to keep the marketing up to get the new customers who are new to the fad and buy stuff.
as revenue has come from "customers" and not "subscribers", it sounds especially stupid to report falling "per subscriber" revenue vs. steady and larger "per customer"
(why not, for example, report "revenue per cubic foot of hot air produced by the CEO" ?)
A subscriber is someone that is signed up for emails. A customer is someone that has ever made a purchase. The number of people that have made a purchase is growing, and the amount they buy per quarter has been steady at around $40 for the past year. The number of people that get the emails, but don't buy has been exploding so revenue per person on the email list has been steadily decreasing. You reached the conclusion that they will require more marketing spend based on a decreasing revenue per subscriber. I draw the opposite conclusion, that spending money to get more people to signup for the email list is probably counter productive becuase incremental customers are unlikely to purchase a groupon, and thus marketing expense should reduced. Same data, opposite conclusion.
