I recently read this, it’s an amazing book and you have summarized it very well

Thanks!

e.g. Online retailers think about LTV over 3 year period vs less than 6 months in some other industries.

Also, if you are looking at LTV from an aggregate say, marketing channel acquisition perspective, then you can understand which channels are better e.g. sponsored links or some biz dev partnerships work out better than coupon/deals websites.

Regards,
Rajat Garg

Perhaps gambling in casinos is highly individualistic. But I’d guess that participants prefer the room to be crowded but not too crowded, and to have some beautiful people who are part of the crowd (not just marked performers). Playing games with others who one finds interesting and fun, word-of-mouth marketing, the negative social value of particular personality characteristics (dour, whiny, griefer) might also be factors with business significance to casinos but that might be overlooked in an individual LTV calculation. Someone in the business should be able to get some data and do some analysis for insight into the quantitative significance of these social factors.

They are also one of the largest spenders on direct mail (closest equivalent to direct response display advertising offline)

Jay Weintraub always has excellent posts and here is one on credit cards: http://www.jayweintraub.com/2008/04/new-strategies.html

mr loveman and his gang certainly talk a great game… but their results never match the hype

this is why during the entire tenure of mr loveman as coo and ceo of harrah’s, harrah;s financial results — the data that actually matters — massively lagged all of harrah’s presumably less-sophisticated peers (e.g. MGM, Penn, Las Vegas Sands, Boyd et al).

and the data sifters that matter — wall street and other financial traders and analysts — noticed, big time. and despite that the media and some silicon valley types swoon over loveman and harrah’s story, harrah’s stock price massively lagged all of its presumably less-dazzling peers. in fact, harrah’s was the worst performing large casino operator stock of the the last ten years. (that is, had you invested in any other large casino operator stock — e.g. MGM et al — you would have done vastly better than had you invested in harrah’s.)

and of course harrah’s was bought out and taken private by TPG and Apollo, two super smart private equity firm who never — never — buy out market leaders (because they are either fairly priced or overpriced.) no TPG and Apollo make money by buying out laggards and fixing them. and sure enough, immediately after the harrah’s buyout deal was announced, essentially all of loveman’s senior team rode off into the sunset.

of course mr loveman is still there, but heck, its the highly regulated casino industry, and most industry observers agree that the deal would never have been approved by regulators had the company been delisted AND switched CEOs at the same time…

Problem is, given the state of the web today, we’re still struggling with finding value, period. Segmenting by non-existent LTV may be a moot point for many startups.