
Not even Airbnb can turn a profit - rblion
https://www.fastcompany.com/90418766/report-not-even-airbnb-can-turn-a-profit
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siberianbear
Perhaps Airbnb's problem is... Airbnb? I mean, it's awful. I've had so many
bad experiences with Airbnb hosts and Airbnb itself that I've written it off
and gone back to a combination of booking.com and Bonvoy (aka Marriott).

The idea of Airbnb seems like it should be profitable, if only it were better
managed.

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ajflores1604
And so did Amazon for the longest time, and also to much controversy.....

This older piece explains it more 'eloquently' than I can [first third is
about Amazon running 'no profit,' the rest is colorfully comparing that to
national deficit]. [https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/why-amazon-isn-t-a-
fucking...](https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/why-amazon-isn-t-a-fucking-
idiot-and-runs-a-deficit-f9d5734b68ec)

The metric you really want to follow in these cases is revenue growth over
time. Cloudflare is a great example. They run a very successful business while
still technically "at a loss". However, with numbers showing almost 50% rev
growth since last year.

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kick
What expense does AirBNB even have that'd make a dent in their revenue? I'm at
a loss.

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monitorman
If you clicked the article, you would see that it is in the first few
paragraphs in bold: marketing and sales. Pretty much what most growth
companies have to spend on in the earlier stages.

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jacquesm
AirBnB is well out of their 'earlier stages'.

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useful
Airbnb has done a good job at defending their platform while uber/lyft has
not. The best example of this is how you can compare prices on google maps for
ride sharing, flights, and hotels but not for home sharing.

They have no immediate pricing pressure, they control the margins and the
advertising. As long as they spend on marketing and avoid creating channels in
aggregators they will be ok.

My only worry is that they do 5-10B/year revenue? So maybe they become a 30B
company. It already looks like they will IPO above that, which will be
unfortunate for any retail investor.

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mv1
It seems like there are a lot of these IPOs lately. The article mentions Uber
and Lyft, but there are others. Peloton is a recent one. WeWork had to shelve
its IPO. Pure Storage is still losing money. How many of these companies can
never make enough money to justify their IPO price, and how many are wisely
investing in growth and market dominance. How long does it take to tell?
Amazon took over a decade to show profits, if memory serves.

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anm89
This is absurd to me. They are bordering on having a total Monopoly and
everyone knows about them. I can't imagine they are getting good returns on
that spend.

I almost suspect that they actually think its a good look to go into the IPO
losing money because it's a trend right now. Nobody wants profit they want
growth potential so it's easier to sell that narrative while leaking money but
growing sales.

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yumraj
I wonder, if Airbnb is going to turn out like Groupon if/when it files for IPO
that we're going to find out funky accounting and revenue bookings not in
accordance with GAAP.

Basically counting all rental as revenue and not just their fees. Or,
something like that.

