"industry norms" was my initial inspiration: maybe Twitter is not a tech company at all, and the industry they're in is actually "media." So what are those norm

"industry norms" was my initial inspiration: maybe Twitter is not a tech company at all, and the industry they're in is actually "media." So what are those norms? So I got the News Corp. annual report. As I said, they seem to account for software costs differently than the companies I showed, so I gave up. It would still be worth some deeper analysis, though. The standard tool in the financial analyst's toolbox is to ask: compared to what? Hardly any company is identical to anything else, so you can always question the comparability of any pair. Accounting is a herculean attempt to make everything comparable, at some basic level. So what should we compare Twitter to? Comments in this thread seem to be either "not those!" or "let's pick one that has a similar number (Facebook), and that's our comparable." Neither of those approaches are really rigorous. I think maybe "a new-age media company" would be a good description of Twitter, rather than "a tech giant." Maybe the merger of Time-Warner with AOL was just 20+ years too early, and Twitter and News Corp. really do converge to become similar businesses.