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Taking Stock Of Twitter's IPO

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Twitter’s big IPO – the buzz, the billions and assessing the value of an empire of tweets.

An updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange features a Twitter logo, Monday, Nov. 4, 2013, in New York. Twitter Inc. will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning after setting a price for its IPO sometime Wednesday evening. (AP)
An updated phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange features a Twitter logo, Monday, Nov. 4, 2013, in New York. Twitter Inc. will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning after setting a price for its IPO sometime Wednesday evening. (AP)

Seems like five minutes ago, Twitter was sort of a joke. This week, it's a big IPO. A public stock offering on the New York Stock Exchange that will value Twitter at over $10 billion. The company with the funny name that introduced us all to tweets and hash tags and 140-character messages is riding a wave or a bubble, depending how you see it. Hoping to raise a lot of cash without taking the kind of dive Facebook did after its sky-high IPO. All the attention is lighting up social media and where it's headed. Our always-on web life. Up next On Point: #TwitterIPO, and where Twitter takes us.
-- Tom Ashbrook

Guests

Zach Seward, senior editor of Atlantic Media's online business news magazine, Quartz. (@ZSeward)

Rob Armstrong, head of Lex, the Financial Times' opinion and analysis column. (@rbrtrmstrng)

Jennifer Van Grove, social media reporter at CNet. (@JBruin)

From Tom's Reading List

Quartz: What Twitter's IPO Means --  "People will call it a bubble, but they’re generally talking finance, as in the reason Pinterest and Snapchat are now worth $4 billion apiece. What I see is a social bubble, the collective delusion that Twitter's IPO is a celebratory event, even if you're not one of the few actually holding a stake in the company."

CNet: Boobs and banner ads: Twitter's Facebook dilemma — "At their worst, Twitter ads now resemble banner ads. Yet instead of being relegated to the right-hand side of a Web page, the ads are popping up in the stream on desktop and mobile. The brand-appeal, however, is that a company can pay to promote a tweet to a wider audience and use the power of an in-line photograph to make a stronger impact. Take Victoria's Secret, for instance, which recently ran a Promoted Tweet with an image of a scantily clad model whose boobs, which would have previously been hidden from view until a person clicked to view them, ran through the timelines of a wide-eyed audience."

New York Times: Twitter Raises Price Range for Its I.P.O. -- "But coming ahead of pricing for the company’s stock, the higher price range suggests Twitter is emboldened after the conclusion of its road show. Thanks to the strong demand for its stock, Twitter is planning to close the order books for its I.P.O. on Tuesday at noon, a day earlier than scheduled, according to people familiar with the matter. Twitter still plans to price on Wednesday and begin trading on Thursday."

Playlist

This program aired on November 5, 2013.

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