Twitter IPO

With Twitter planning to go public with it's IPO in early November 2013, it becomes another strong and consistently growing Internet / Digital brand to seek public investors. Twitter will get listed by Mid-November and irrespective of popular sentiment whether to invest in Twitter or not, it is one of the top Digital Brands and has proven it's popularity with 300 Billion tweets till date on its online

micro-blogging platform. Contrary to general public sentiments, strong and consistently growing Internet / Digital brands have always rewarded the best Return on Investment to investors. Of course a lot of patience is needed.

Amazon - 24,126.00% return since its IPO in May, 1997 

eBay - 2,661.50% return since its IPO in Sept, 1998

Google - 837.31% return since its IPO in Aug, 2004

Baidu (Chinese) - 1,200.47%  return since its IPO in Aug, 2005

Amazon has by far given the best ROI to long term investors compared to any other strong and popular Internet / Digital Brand. During the 2000-2003 period however, a lot of patience was needed by Amazon's shareholders as all Internet related companies were punished during those times. Those long term Amazon shareholders who stayed with it's stock through bad times, got all these brilliant returns by 2013. Of course Amazon listed long before Google, and this also means Google's stock still has lots and lots of room to grow even further, given that its brands like Google, YouTube, Gmail, Blogspot etc. are most popular among Digital users.   

Even Digital brands without any decent usage or popularity in US have given brilliant returns to investors, as long as they have been strong, consistently growing in popularity and user focused. Take Baidu, largest search engine in China and hardly used outside Chinese speaking population.

It is too early to make decide about Facebook's stock, since it has been listed only 17 months ago in May 2012. Given the popularity and strong brand value of Facebook as a super Digital brand, investors with patience may be celebrating a big party in a decade around 2023, just like Amazon's long term shareholders have done now in 2013.  With 1 billion active users, Facebook is no small turkey. Same with Twitter. Time is a great leveler for the patient investors in Internet / Digital brands. 

Disclaimer: All returns shown above for different companies, are absolute returns as on current date of this blog post, since the date of their respective IPOs. 

Signature: Roopkumar T.V.