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Comment by gsmaverick | Hacker News Reader

Twitter has a very clear business model: advertising. They are on track to make $150+ million this year from it.

Which means they're valued at 51 times revenue. To put that in perspective, Google is valued at just over 6 times revenue.

Totally different stages of business and incomparable. Google revenue is growing steadily, since $30B p.a for a single revenue stream is about as big as you can get.

If you want a proper comparison, Google's PE ratio was 150 at IPO (and 300 at the high range of estimates, and it eventually reached that)

A lot of smart people thought that was a bad buy at the time, as well:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/the-google-ipo-skeptics

Google turned a profit every year since 2001 and earned a profit of $105.6 million on revenues of $961.8 million during 2003. They IPO'd August 2004.

and Twitter has revenue of $150M and is probably 2 years away from an IPO. Just because it hasn't made a profit each year, like Google, doesn't mean that you can compare its current 50x PE to Google's current 6x

I would suggest that Twitter are likely waiting to book an entire year of profits and 3-4 years of revenue growth before they file

I thought much of Twitter's revenue came from licensing their firehose to Google, etc.

That was true for a moment. They did the Google/Bing firehose deals before they had promoted tweets/trends program.

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