Micro-blogging site Twitter has been valued at a whopping $ 7 billion these days.
The Journal has compiled some interesting statistics and time-lines for Twitter:
Seven months: That’s about how long it took Twitter’s valuation to nearly double, from the $3.7 billion valuation in a December investment from Kleiner Perkins, to the $7 billion figure today.
What has changed in seven months? Twitter’s new advertising models have had time to gain traction, of course. But the more salient factor may be the eye-popping valuations of some freshly public social media companies such as LinkedIn ($8.5 billion) and Pandora ($3 billion). Not to mention the soaring valuations of other private tech companies such as Facebook ($50 billion plus).
$150 Million: That’s eMarketer’s estimate for Twitter’s potential revenue from advertising this year. If that’s an accurate picture of Twitter’s total revenue, that means Twitter now is valued at 47 times its estimated annual sales.
$8.24 billion: You think $7 billion is a rich valuation for Twitter? On SharesPost, one of the private exchanges for accredited investors to buy shares of closely held companies, a recent Twitter common stock trade came at an implied valuation of $8.24 billion.
Ten: The number of privately held companies currently valued at $1 billion or more, according to Dow Jones VentureSource and based on investments from venture capital firms. In history, there have only been 29 of these private tech companies valued in the billion dollar stratosphere.
Twitter hasn’t declared an IPO yet nor has it hinted that it will be going public anytime soon. Yet, it is not surprising that there is a buzz that Twitter should / could be going public – even if $ 7 billion does seem a bit high to some skeptics.
Of late, there has been much hype over recently declared IPOs from Groupon and Zynga for $ 750 million and $ 1 billion respectively. There is also speculation that Facebook will go public by the end of 2011 with valuation estimates hovering between $ 65 billion and $ 100 billion. However, Mark Zuckerberg’s reply to all the speculation was a simple ‘Not yet’ at the eG8 forum in Paris in May.
But as for Twitter, we might have to wait a bit longer for that one as it seems that the micro-blogging giant is satisfied with private investments for the time being.