Example In the year a group of musicians launched a surf music social website, a site on which people who enjoy listening to instrumental surf guitar could communicate and interact with each other. The site receives revenue from organizations that place advertisements on the site's pages. The musicians constructed the revenue function
to model the revenue the site should realize from online advertising months after the beginning of
A financial analyst claims that under this model, the site will realize its maximum revenue months after the beginning of and then from that time on the revenue will decrease slowly to Assuming the revenue model to be true, should the website's managers accept or reject this analyst's forecast?
Solution The analyst makes statements about a function's maximum value and its decreasingatadecreasingrate behavior. Such a claim involves the first and second derivatives.
Begin by finding the first and second derivative of and the critical values.
and
when Solving this equation, we get
The values and make no sense in the context of the problem, so the only critical value is We can make a sign chart to see where the function is increasing or decreasing.
Figure
As the sign chart shows, at changes from increasing to decreasing, indicating a maximum occurs at that point. This means the media site will see its maximum revenue months after the beginning of contradicting the analyst's claim of months.
Also for all values of and These results mean that for all months after the maximum revenue is realized, the revenue function decreases at an increasing rate. This, again, contradicts the analyst's forecast that the site's revenue will decrease slowly to The revenue will decrease quickly to The website's managers should reject both the analyst's forecasts.decreases at an increasing rate. This, again, contradicts the analyst's forecast that the site's revenue will decrease slowly to The revenue will decrease quickly to The website's managers should reject both the analyst's forecasts.
In Section we used the first derivative test to determine if a critical value of a function produced a relative maximum or a relative minimum. Because a function is concave upward at a point if its second derivative is positive at that point, it makes sense that if is a critical value of the function, then it must produce a relative minimum. See Figure Likewise, because a function is concave downward at a point if its second derivative is negative at that point, it makes sense that if is a critical value of the function, then it must produce a relative maximum. See Figure
produces a relative minimum and fis concave
produces a relative upward at downward at
Figure
Repeat example using the function