According to the Wall Street Journal, both Google and facebook have been in “low-level” talks to buy Twitter. Twitter may be valued as high as $10 billion. Twitter is valued at $105 for each of the 95 million tweets its users write every day. (I’ll wait for my share of the check for those Twitter messages.)
Twitter has swaths of
more after the jump
devoted users, but it still requires repeated explanation to my mom –- and to many regular Joe Web users. Of the people who use the Internet, just 12% use Twitter, according to a recent survey by Pew Research Center. Compare that to facebook (used by 62% of Internet users), and text messaging (used by 74% of cell phone owners), Pew found.
We may have gotten used to high value tech companies – Facebook at $50 billion, for example – but Twitter is in another stratosphere.
Twitter’s revenue last year was $45 million. So a $10 billion valuation would be more than 200 times the company’s revenue, or nearly 100 times its estimated 2011 revenue of $100 million to $110 million.
For sure Twitter has changed how many people, watch major events like the Super Bowl, and keep tabs on news, and swarm to social events major (Egypt protests) and minor (flash mobs). But does Twitter really have more enduring value than the last generation of tech companies, which created search engines, smart phones and cloud computing?
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