Groupon isn't going to give its (recent) investors a return on what they put in, but they've always been profitable; their overheads are tiny, and they take 50% of the revenue from each deal for themselves.
I have no idea how Grooveshark ever made or plans to make any money (heck, when I worked at last.fm we were celebrating our most successful year ever in which we'd only lost $1m. 5/6 of our income had come from advertising, and 5/6 of that from targeted ads, which IIRC Grooveshark doesn't do).
Kickstarter appears to be deliberately set up as a non-profit organization.
I didn't know Kickstarter was a non-profit organization, I didn't find it on their website, would you mind pointing it to me?
For Groupon, for me a profit is making more money than you spend and as you said they keep 50% of each deal but then they have to spend money to pay everything and also need a lot of advertisement. Therefore afaik they have no actual profit, which would mean returning money to the investors.
>I didn't know Kickstarter was a non-profit organization, I didn't find it on their website, would you mind pointing it to me?
I meant that was how I read the OP site. Seems like it's not true, in which case I don't understand what the site is actually saying about kickstarter.
>For Groupon, for me a profit is making more money than you spend and as you said they keep 50% of each deal but then they have to spend money to pay everything and also need a lot of advertisement. Therefore afaik they have no actual profit, which would mean returning money to the investors.
What I meant was I believe they're operating at a profit, but their stock price is collapsing because it was buoyed up by expectations of growth that hasn't materialized. So investors have lost a lot of money, even though the company's income exceeds its expenditure.
Kickstarter received Venture funding from USV (Fred Wilson et al). Since Non-profits don't generally have shareholders I would assume this means that Kickstarter is a For-profit corporation.
Groupon has over 10,000 employees, roughly 2.5 times as many as Facebook, more than Bing or Google Search, and a good 1/3 as many as Google had pre-Motorola-acquisition.
I have no idea how Grooveshark ever made or plans to make any money (heck, when I worked at last.fm we were celebrating our most successful year ever in which we'd only lost $1m. 5/6 of our income had come from advertising, and 5/6 of that from targeted ads, which IIRC Grooveshark doesn't do).
Kickstarter appears to be deliberately set up as a non-profit organization.