If you have friends who work at Twitter, or if you have friends who concern themselves with such things, be prepared to be hearing an earful about the long-term profitability and valuation of Twitter in the coming months. Yes, that's right, it's IPO time.
According to the NY Post, banks have already been courting the company to land the job of leading Twitter's public offering. And Twitter's top brass have reportedly been hemming and hawing already about wanting something lower profile and less disastrous than Facebook's troubled IPO of last year. But low profile? Good luck.
A week ago, the NYT's Dealbook was already advising Twitter to follow Google's IPO route of a "modified Dutch auction" rather than Facebook's failed path, allowing interested parties to bid on shares in order to set the IPO price.
The best Twitter can hope for is that their IPO price is more modest, and that rather than tanking on Day 2 it actually goes up and stays up. It may help that the company is on the road to $1 billion in ad revenue next year, and already is expected to bank $582 million in revenue this year, which is news to us.
An IPO is expected within a few months, although all talks have been informal and no such announcement has yet been made. But that's how these things go.
Meanwhile, the fate of the Facebook stock hasn't been that bad. After taking a drubbing in the press for eight months or so, Zuckerberg's coffers are doing quite nicely now, with the stock climbing right back to its IPO price in recent weeks, and hit a high of $39.32 earlier this month.
