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"Fueling more speculation about a possible IPO next year, an analyst looking at trading in secondary markets says  Twitter's value is now north of $11 billion. \nMax Wolff, an analyst with Greencrest, told Forbes that Twitter's value is up since Facebook's IPO last year. \"Using the secondary market for shares to mark enterprise value is a very difficult and opaque process. It is a rumor rich and special share class soup,\" he told the publication. \nThe $11 billion figure reflects the growth in users and \"new monetization efforts are both yielding fruit and pointing toward a good 2013 for Twitter,\" Wolff added. Rumors of a purchase by Apple are also boosting the numbers. The secondary market refers to the buying and selling of pre-existing investments in the company. The SEC caps the number of investors at 499. Beyond that, a company is required to go public.\nThough Twitter's valuation is far less than the $100 billion figure floated for the pre-IPO Facebook, Wolff concluded that Twitter 's valuation looks better than Facebook's did when it went public. \nThe last figure circulated for Twitter's valuation was $8 billion in July 2011. That amount was extrapolated by an $800 million round of funding that Twitter secured at the time. In December 2010, Twitter's valuation was estimated at $3.7 billion. \nDespite the growth of Twitter's business \u2014 eMarketer estimates revenues for the company will hit $1 billion in 2014 \u2014 CEO Dick Costolo said as recently as September that the company has no plans to go public. \nTwitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.  \nImage courtesy of iStockphoto, arakonyunus"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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