

How Amazon is making money by giving it away - cwan
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/01/19/how-amazon-is-making-money-by-giving-it-away/

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plusbryan
This article misses the point entirely. LivingSocial just acquired a shit-ton
of users for $10 each. Period. That's an extremely low acquisition cost for a
lifetime user value of $50 or more. They now have more than a million credit
cards and email addresses that they didn't have before.

[http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-
sell...](http://www.lifeinbeta.org/2011/01/why-living-social-can-sell-20-of-
amazon-gift-cards-for-10-or-the-economics-of-setting-fire-to-money-as-a-user-
acquisition-strategy/)

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ianferrel
Did they, though? What's the retention going to be on those users?

I signed up yesterday to get the giftcard, and my experience was pretty bad: I
followed a link a friend gave me, and it asked me for some info, then took me
to a landing page with my city listed explaining how LivingSocial works. It
had a link for "Today's deal", but clicking on that link just took me back to
the same "how LivingSocial works" page. Finally I clicked on the referral link
I had again, and it took me to the Washington, DC page, which had the Amazon
gift card. I bought it.

This morning, I received an email from LivingSocial for the current
Washington, DC deal, which is some local pizza place. I unsubscribed. Looks
like they didn't test well enough to make things actually work for the huge
influx of users.

Furthermore, I'm not at all convinced that I'm missing anything. Obviously,
the really good deals will be shared on Hacker News and other networks I
already pay attention to, so why stay subscribed to a daily email?

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jonknee
FWIW, the deals are primarily local (Amazon is an exception), so the really
good ones [for you] won't be shared here.

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MJR
The author didn't read the fine print on the deal - *Amazon.com is not a
sponsor of this promotion.

LivingSocial is making the grab for customers and if Amazon isn't a sponsor of
the promotion then they certainly aren't losing more than 6 million dollars as
the author claims.

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jonknee
In case you can't play or don't want to watch the video (an SNL commercial
parody), here's the reveal:

"How do you make money doing this? The answer is simple. Volume."

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xutopia
For some reason I can't play that video. Maybe it's because I'm in Canada.

Anyone have the tldw for the video?

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mdwrigh2
I doubt it's because you're in Canada. Doesn't work for me either, and I'm in
the USA, but also running Linux, which Flash doesn't get along with.

Granted, I am Canadian, so maybe it's just prejudiced against Canadians in
general, not where you live... :-)

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artmageddon
I doubt it's because you're Canadian ;)

Running Windows and Firefox (which Flash normally gets along with) but it's
not working for me either.

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danteembermage
I can't watch the video (Chrome, US, Windows), but it's likely the change bank
commercial.

[http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/first-
citywide-...](http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/first-citywide-
change-bank/229045/)

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mise
tl;didn't watch answer?

