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by riams 5060 days ago
Doesn't LTV stand for "[customer] life time value," i.e. the amount of money you'll be able to generate from a customer during his/her time with your business, and not "long term value"?
4 comments

I picked up on that as well. Wikipedia seems to agree with us: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifetime_value

I agree with their points, but overall the article is just a little bit "off". Maybe it's the bit about the integral. If you had a customer pay you $1 every month, and they on average stayed for one month, your LTV is $1, not the integral of 1*x (1/2).

I've always seen customer lifetime value abbreviated as CLV. That being said, I've never heard of 'long term value', and I think the author is mistaking this term for CLV.

Customer lifetime value is something calculable, even if crudely -- its amortized revenue per customer as retention approaches zero. "Long term value" is more of a concept.

It really depends who you talk to. At Groupon EU, Japan, Korea and USA we called customer life time value "LTV".

Also, Avinash Kaushik, author of one of the best books on Web Analytic and previous Google Evangelist, uses LTV as well.

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/analytics-tip-calculate-ltv-c...

Typo. Thanks.