Well you can actually measure a company's performance in a number of ways, ranging from return to investors (the no holds barred bottom line) all the way to goodwill and brand recognition (the intangibles).

One reason to weight revenue favorably as compared to profit is that many companies in their growth state are heavily investing in the future, and so profit doesn't take into account that it's a strong company that's becoming stronger by investing in its own people and capital expenditures. Also profit is sometimes subject to the whims of a down economy. Furthermore, profit doesn't tell what *volume* of business a company is doing (you might sell 1 T-shirt and have a profit of $5 whereas a large company that shipped 50 million music players and improved the value of its brand name but only made $5 in the same quarter may have significantly improved its position toward future sales.

A lot depends on what you're measuring for really. A lot of seasoned stock analysts like to look at book value and price-to-earnings. Keep in mind some companies are masterful at suppressing profit in an official sense in order to escape tax penalties, meanwhile they're quite wealthy and doing just fine.

In that sense, revenue is a much more true and direct statement of how customers are responding to (and buying) the end product and/or service.

You look at revenue to determine company size and market share. Also, for young companies/young markets, revenue can be more important than profit to determine growth and opportunity. (I've managed companies to $0 profit which were growing quite nicely.)

For established companies in established markets, managing to a profit is a much better judge of the organization and management.

Revenue is an indication of how popular a company's products or services are, whereas profit is a measure of their ability to balance costs against revenues. For companies in the early stages, a lot of investment can be necessary to get off the ground and this can hurt profits, but high revenues CAN be an indicator of future success when the spending slows down.