

The terrible numbers that Groupon doesn’t want you to focus on - moses1400
http://blog.agrawals.org/2011/08/15/the-terrible-numbers-that-groupon-doesnt-want-you-to-focus-on/

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lazyjeff
"The median number of Groupons sold to each Groupon customer (someone who has
bought anything): 1."

"The median number of Groupons sold to each person on Groupon’s mailing list:
0."

The median doesn't seem like a fair way to measure either of these. Obviously
there the distribution of Groupons sold is skewed, so the mean is likely to be
much higher than the median. It would probably paint a clearer picture to say
"Of the 25% of people on the mailing list that bought something, half bought 1
groupon, and the other half bought on average 3.6 groupons." (numbers are made
up)

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smackfu
Median is pretty pointless, but so is mean. An actual distribution would be
much better than both.

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lazyjeff
Obviously a distribution would be best, but for a single number, the mean is
better. For example, if groupon says they have 100,000 customers and they will
have 200,000 customers next year, and the mean # of groupons per customer is
2.5, then I can compute that they sell 250,000 groupons per year, and if they
get 200,000 groupons, they will sell 500,000 groupons per year. The median
tells us none of that.

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qq66
I think we got the point. This is starting to sound like thinkcomp on
Facebook.

