Yeah, but Indeed seems to be making plenty of money: $434m rev in 2014, $300m 1/2 year rev in 2015!

I'm really curious what went wrong...

http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-2014-revenue-434-millio...

http://press.indeed.com/press/indeed-half-year-2015-revenue-...

Many times companies can inflate revenues, or the revenue is very costly to acquire.

These are two examples, though I don't know enough about Simply Hired to say if they did either.

1) Companies with Ad Revenue quote the gross amount, rather than the net they keep. So let's say that someone spends a dollar on advertising. 60 cents may go to the website that hosted the ad, 10 cents to their software vendor, 20 cents to an exchange, and 10 cents to the buyer's website. Everyone counts this as a dollar of revenue, even though they're passing through most of the costs. This is most often seen in advertising or other reselling markets.

2) They spend $2000 in advertising to get a customer with a lifetime value of $1000. Sometimes this is a deliberate Ponzi scheme, other times it's done with honest intent. It can be very hard to predict lifetime customer value.

About your second point, the only reason companies might do is to show growth and get more funding. Otherwise it's plain stupid IMO. For enterprise customers the predicting lifetime value might be tough, but in consumer business,they should be able to predict at least the average lifetime.

It can be tougher in consumer businesses. A game may seem hot for a while, but then all the users move at once. Or early adopters use the software longer or slower than the average user who comes later.

This doesn't mean they shouldn't be measured, just that it's very tough to get it accurate, and a small change in user churn can have a huge impact on corporate valuation.

As i see, Indeed has better scrapers and SEO for a start. It established itself as a market leader in this business, also built simple products like letting companies directly post jobs, making it easy to apply from mobile(they acquired mobolt for this) and also working on Indeed Premium( a hired clone). With that kind of traffic, if simplyhired had launched any decent products to help recruiters, they would have easily been counting a lot of $$$$. A stale product is the reason for its death.

SEO + they did a really good job on their partner program. In simpler terms a shitload of free Google traffic along with a safer, diversified stream which cash flows very nicely. Both things that basically act as expanding moats the longer they are maintained.

s/Premium/Prime/

If they were overly-dependent on SEO... their Alexa rank sure seems to have fallen a lot since the middle of 2015.

Maybe I'm mistaken, but the name rings a bell from a scraper company I worked at some 10 years ago (I left that company in 2008).

Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest))

This scraper was easier programming then anything else out there (think visual domain specific programming language). 7 years after having left that company I was called into an interview at a rather big HR company, with them essentially asking me to meet and greet a group of 20 people, all of them working with an old old version of said software, that I had worked on releasing - as a team of two - many years prior. Quite the bizarre encounter telling them how to work with a product that was IE 5.5 compatible, and drawing on old legacy knowledge for said purpose.

> Our scraper back then was light years ahead of any others, both in regards to performance (think checkpointing of program state) + accuracy of parsing and JS execution (back then the target goal was a complete emulation of IE6+, sans ActiveX (exception being various host objects such as XMLHttpRequest))

If you don't mind, can you tell me the name of the software? I was very much into scraping business myself around 2008. One of things I failed to do was to scrape a site made in ASP.NET Webforms. I was looking for software that could emulate Javascript and I think can recall something of that sorts that I saw.

Software was Kapow RoboSuite, it's since been going through a few acquisitions and can now be found at http://www.kofax.com/data-integration-extraction. The web site really doesnt tell a great story of the technical details, best thing is probably http://www.kofax.com/~/media/Files/Kofax/Datasheets/kapow/ds...