I find it interesting that a Groupon user ends up being so highly valued by the market. I wonder if it's because Groupon can make money from each user in ways other than advertising.

I doubt it - Skype is last on the list yet first on the list of paid products. The fact that groupon's rev comes from a percentage of sales doesn't really mean they aren't advertising based, anyway. It's pretty much the same as running CPA (cost per action) ads.

I think common wisdom is that they're valued based on the size of the local ad market and because of how hard it's been for others to break into local.

Ah, I forgot about Skype. Anecdotally though, most people I know only use the free parts of Skype.

My understanding is that Skype makes the bulk of their money off of international calls bridged Skype to that country's local telephone service (which is often substantially less than calling cards, or direct long distance).

I know very little about the stock market, but isn't the individual share price totally meaningless on its own?

That isn't the point they're making here, though. They're comparing the valuation with the size of the user base. For example, at $3b for LinkedIn, divided by the number of users they have, it comes to about $33.33 per user. In other words, a sort of very rough market valuation of what the industry thinks the users are worth, I suppose.

Got it, thanks.

It is, but the above list is per user, not per share, which certainly has meaning.

Not totally meaningless, but certainly it doesn't tell you the value of the company unless you know how many shares exist.

However, the comment you replied to isn't about stock prices, it's about the value of each user for each of those companies - user as in somebody who uses those services.