There is bags of buzz on the street about the approaching Nielsen IPO.

Provided you have not heard about it, what rock have you been thrashing under?

This is what is ahead my friend.

Nielsen Holdings, better recognized for its TV ratings business, has operations in about 100 countries and annual revenue of about $5 billion.

Nielsen, the tv ratings and consumer research company, wishes to raise $1.9 billion in an initial public offering.

Nielsen, which is based in the Netherlands, stated in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it will use proceeds to reduce its debt of $8.9 billion and for general corporate purposes.

What? Thus in other words, Nielsen wishes to do an IPO to pay its bills. How much trouble is Nielsen in? Nielsen a short time ago had to sell its well-known in-print magazines Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter. They are in a huge amount of trouble.

The quandary is the niche that Nielsen has enjoyed functioning in for so many years. Nielsen no longer is grandfather of the niche. In theory, Nielsen seems to have been moved down to third rank at best. The niche is at the present much more competitive than it has been in the past thanks to advances in technology.

With new technologies in cable TV and satellite broadcast services, cable operators like Comcast can sell viewership facts that is collected from their cable boxes effectively destroying the need for Nielsen boxes. Most recently even Google is working to get in on the action with their Google TV that is set to come out in early 2011. Google knows the significance of data collected by cable boxes. There is just no way that Nielsen can try to win against the likes of Comcast and Google.

If that is not enough logic for why you need to keep away from this IPO then consider the hostile to IPO market we are in. There has been an uncommonly high number of IPOs that have ended up being priced below what was initially desired. Investors have only been willing to buy IPOs priced at a deep discount. So the question begs, why would Nielsen Holdings strive for an IPO at the present time in this market? The reason may be because they have to in an attempt to pay the bills.

I can think of a ton of better reasons to buy an IPO such as a solar panel manufacturing company using an IPO to build another manufacturing plant. This is an IPO I would keep away from. There is something that rubs me the wrong way about a corporation using an IPO simply to pay the bills. If that’s not a huge gigantic crimson flashing warning sign to stock traders, I do not know what is.

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