http://business.time.com/2013/11/07/twitter-ipo-leads-to-sky-high-24-billion-valuation/
Twitter could raise $2.1 billion if an zunderwriters’ over-allotment is exercised, as expected, making it the second largest Internet offering in the United States behind Facebook Inc.’s $16 billion IPO last year and ahead of Google Inc.’s 2004 IPO, according to Thomson Reuters data.
Under Dick Costolo, who took over as CEO in October 2010, Twitter has rapidly ramped up its money-making engine by selling “promoted tweets,” messages from marketers that are distributed to a wide-ranging but targeted group of users. In the third quarter, Twitter had $168 million in revenue, it said, more than double from a year prior. It is just a right sense of distance. Twitter gives a very appropriate sense of distance, the BBS and blog, and a question and answer psychological distance is too far away, and in the MSN, QQ and other IM tools, and people and too close a distance. Twitter will be just the right distance between friends right. In both, can be the sidelines. When people use Twitter they are following certain people, they’re searching for specific information,” said Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets. “There are powerful marketing signals that are almost Google-esque, something that Facebook doesn’t really have.” Twitter quickly began to penetrate popular culture in unexpected ways, with its open design and broadcasting format-attracting celebrities, athletes, politicians and anybody who wanted to share short, punchy thoughts with a digital audience.
Fans believe that Twitter, which has 230 million users, has established itself as an indispensable Internet utility alongside Google and Facebook, and that it has only scratched the surface of its potential as a global advertising medium.