Technology companies are known for coming up with novel ways to measure their businesses.
Some of these can seem a little shady, such as Groupon’s (GRPN) adjusted consolidated segment operating income, while other newfangled metrics can just be hard to compare with anything else. Twitter’s timeline views per monthly average user fits in the latter category, with no ready analog offered by any of the other large social media services. On the other hand, widely cited statistics like revenue per user can be less useful than they are interesting. After all, a Facebook (FB) user isn’t the same thing as a Twitter account: People often have multiple Twitter handles, while Facebook tries to hold every person to just one.
If you’re hungry to match Twitter up against other public tech companies, here are a few straightforward comparisons.