This comes on top of an article a few days ago that (to people in the business at least) was almost as preposterous, in which their ranking criterion for VC funds was number of acquisitions. http://www.privco.com/top-20-venture-capital-firms-with-the-...
I once was peripherally involved in a large commercial real estate deal in a major city. The press (a major paper- I forget which one, specifically, but you'd recognize it) reported the value of the deal without including the debt, which was most of the financing. It is hard to be more wrong about financial matters than that, but that is the state of financial journalism.
All kidding aside, it seems almost criminal that a company would create such damaging news as a way of generating publicity (speaking, of course, about LivingSocial). I just can't fathom what would drive someone to do this, unless someone who was leaving LivingSocial wanting to spread a lot of damaging news about their old employer.
Ehh that ranking should have included IPO exits, which LP's do care about, but then again, it did expressively state that it was based on their annual M&A report.....which, given the topic, could not include ipo exits....but then again, this data is so shady, a list is better than no list.