I'm not an economics major, but Zynga's costs certainly doesn't mean that the profit of $300 can be judged from their revenues divided by their new customers. Zynga spent $120 million. Okay. They have 400,000 new customers. That doesn't mean that Zynga was spending all that money to pull in customers. What you would need to do is to find out how much was spent on advertising and compare it then. A paying customer for their sorts of games are also flawed- you can spend a couple dollars and bring down the entire average.

His opinion is also irrelevant to the article's "findings" at all so I'm not sure why he included it.
[quote]In other research it is also known that the average paying customer spends $150. This loss of $150 per new paying customer is what the analysts are really concerned with.[/q]
This research isn't cited and as far as I'm concerned, I'm not going to bother looking it up.