While we’ve been down this road before, “our attention is peaked” because companies including Salesforce and Google are now being thrown into the mix, said Forrester analyst Erna Alfred Liousas.
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Twitter has struggled during its three years as a publicly traded company.
Shares of Twitter were up more than 15 percent pre-market and climbed further after the news that suitors are examining the possibility of a deal and assessing Twitter’s willingness to engage on that possibility.
Speculation that Twitter is ripe for a sale has been swirling for months as the microblogging site has failed to draw new users, leading to several quarters of stagnant growth and a plummeting stock. Both Google and Salesforce declined to comment on a potential purchase of Twitter.
Still, the company reported its weakest revenue growth since its stock market flotation in 2013 back in July, with second quarter revenue rising 20% to 602 million U.S. dollars (£460 million).
Afshar listed several reasons why a company would be interested in buying Twitter, noting that the service is a “great place to promote others” and offers “the best real time, context rich news”. TechCrunch stated today that its sources have indicated that Microsoft’s interest in Twitter “in part, is an attempt by the company to drive the price up to keep it out of Salesforce’s hands”.
If believed to CNBC, Twitter had a talks with Google too and soon is learned to be receiving a formal bid.
The rumblings of a potential buyout put Twitter’s stock up 20 percent on Friday, but no sale is imminent. Where Twitter lags behind in monetisation, Google could potentially pick up the slack, Digital Spy said. Facebook now has some 1.71 billion monthly active users while Twitter has just 313 million.
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Other contenders such as Microsoft and Verizon could also make good use of Twitter’s assets.
