How Airbnb measures listing lifetime value

A deep dive on the framework that lets us identify the most valuable listings for our guests. By: Carlos Sanchez-Martinez, Sean O’Donnell, Lo-Hua Yuan, Yunshan Zhu At Airbnb, we always strive to provide our community with the best experience. To do so, it’s important to understand what kinds of accommodation listings are valuable to our guests. We achieve this by calculating and using estimates of listing lifetime value. These estimates not only allow us to identify which types of listings resonate best with guests, but also help us develop resources and recommendations for hosts to increase the value driven by their listings. Most of the existing literature on lifetime value focuses on traditional sales channels in which a single seller transacts with many buyers (e.g. a retailer selling clothing to a customer). In contrast, this blog post explains how we model lifetime value in a platform like Airbnb, with multiple sellers and buyers. In the first section, we describe our general ... Read full article.