Abstract:
The growth of subscription-based commerce has changed the types of data firms report to external shareholders. More than ever before, companies are discussing/disclosing data such as churn, customers acquired, customer lifetime value, and more. As such, there is increasing interest in linking the value of a firm's customers to the overall value of the firm. Although a number of researchers in the fields of marketing and accounting have explored this idea, previous work did not drive customer-based valuation estimates off of the widely accepted discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation model, nor did the underlying models of customer acquisition and retention fully reflect all of the empirical realities associated with these behaviors. We develop a framework for valuing subscription-based firms that addresses both of these issues, incorporating critical factors such as heterogeneity, duration dependence, seasonality, and macroeconomic variables into a customer-based DCF model. Furthermore, our framework explicitly acknowledges that publicly disclosed data is overly aggregated, with missingness. We apply this methodology to data for Dish Network and Sirius XM Holdings, estimating the value of the firms, analyzing customers' unit economics, performing customer segmentation, and developing a new investor metric, the internal rate of return on a customer (IRRC).