With the Twitter IPO approaching, Twitter is looking for different ways to justify their large evaluation of $1,000,000,000 given that Twitter did $317 million in the most recent full year, according to TechCrunch.

Advertising for television shows is one way that Twitter hopes to draw in advertisers.  According to CNBC, “Nielsen is launching Twitter TV Ratings, the first measure of the total activity and reach of TV-related conversation on Twitter—to help identify who’s really engaging in real time and to better target ads.”

The new rating will measure the number of people tweeting about certain television shows and the number of people who actually read those tweets.  Twitter is trying to partner more with traditional media companies, which is one of the growth areas they have identified during their S-1 filing in preparation for their IPO.

However, this may just be a distraction from the real problem that compared other tech companies who have done an IPO; Twitter doesn’t stack up very well.

Taken from WSJ.

According to Eric Jackson of Forbes, “Twitter is supposed to have 100 million “active” users — although, 40% of the “active” users never tweet but just read tweets.  That means Twitter is able to generate a buck thirty-nine for each of its active users.  If it’s true that Facebook did $4 billion last year from its 700 million users, they sold $5.71 for each user — or 4 times as much as Twitter.

Given that some more profitable companies such as Facebook, had a less that positive few months after their IPO, Twitter may be in trouble for its IPO.