It's not plain and simple. The thought, at the time, was that the marketing expenses _can_ be amortized. GAAP doesn't let you do that (there's only certain ki

It's not plain and simple. The thought, at the time, was that the marketing expenses _can_ be amortized. GAAP doesn't let you do that (there's only certain kinds of marketing expenses you can amortize). Groupon's view was that the marketing expenses were a dial they could dial down at any time to reduce total amount of customer acquisition and they would still have residual customer capture. Groupon was, perhaps stupidly, trying to give potential investors more information. Aaron swartz had a post about it as well: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/acsoi http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/acsoi