Angie’s List has never made a dime of profit in almost 20 years.

Amazing, I didn't believe but just double checked google finance:

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AANGI&fstype=ii&ei=MZFaVMiLHsXFqQHxg4HoCA

Unbelievable. Also, note the amount of debt that's been put into the company.

I don't have a problem with a company not making a profit as long as their revenues are growing quickly. The perfect example of this is Amazon. They usually don't post a profit or if they do it's a very small one.

The reason that happens is because they spend heavily on opening up new distribution centers to decrease shipping times, and also on discounts and other forms of acquiring new customers like Amazon Fresh, Amazon Prime, Kindles, etc.

If Amazon decided to stop doing all those things, they would generate billions in profit every quarter, but they wouldn't remain dominant for long if they did that. This is why Amazon is likely to be around and dominant 30+ years from now, whereas other companies that just want to return money to shareholders won't be.

Angie's is stock is in the toilet and they are up for sale. They might well be on their way to become another dotcom penny stock during the next downturn (for those of you who remember that last dotcom crash).

Amzn may be still dominating in 30 yrs with little profit, but their stock will eventually fall if they choose not to generate profit. I don't have a problem with Amazon not making in profit either (good for me as a consumer), but I wouldn't be very happy if I owned their stock for the long-term.

I have a naive question. Amazon is operating in 2 of the world's largest economies(USA & India) where they are the biggest and 2nd biggest respectively. If they are still not making profit, isn't that scary?