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.