Is Twitter Really Worth $10 Billion?

“I spent the last week trying to write a column that proved Twitter wasn’t worth $10 billion. Then the facts intervened.

Stubbornly, they arranged themselves into a most unexpected conclusion, one that seems almost blasphemy to type: Twitter has the potential to match some of the money-gushing properties of the Internet’s greatest money gusher,Google Inc. GOOG +1.22%

If you watched the Oscars Sunday night, you saw Twitter’s raw influence on display as jaunty red carpeters, advertisers and actors gabbed in Twitter’s sometimes-obtuse language of hashtags and handles. It was as if the world had folded in on itself—all-powerful television reduced to being a lowly portal to social media.

That cultural ascendancy isn’t lost on Twitter and its investors, who are said to be plotting what would be the premier public offering of 2013. In recent weeks the seven-year-old company completed private transactions that pegged its value at $9 billion. Others have put the value above $10 billion.

This is remarkable because Twitter has been in the money-making game for only three years, primarily selling “sponsored tweets” to advertisers whose come-ons pop up in the message streams of the service’s 200 million-plus active users.

It’s working. Advertising-data-firm eMarketer Inc. estimates 2014 revenue at $808 million, but people in the venture-capital community are already whispering that Twitter will break $1 billion by then. In fact, eMarketer will soon revise its figures upward though it won’t say by how much….”

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