Savvy investors do split this revenue into two buckets: 1. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or what passes through the marketplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wik

Savvy investors do split this revenue into two buckets: 1. Gross merchandise volume (GMV), or what passes through the marketplace: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_merchandise_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_merchandise_volume 2. Fee revenue, which is what the marketplace actually retains This knowledge is common among investors, like item #6 on http://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/ http://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/. It may not be common among, say, individual private wealth management clients of Morgan Stanley who funded their SPV (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/business/dealbook/deal-shows-investors-are-willing-to-make-a-blind-bet-on-uber.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/05/business/dealbook/deal-sho...), but they chose to invest without any revenue reporting at all, so it's probably not what made the difference.