I’m a big fan of Alley Insider’s Chart of the Day service in which the online news publication puts relevant news in chart form.
But their latest effort left me scratching my head. What grabbed my attention was the title of the post: “LinkedIn Is The Only Consumer Tech IPO That’s Doing Well.”
Really?
I am not here to fly the hometown flag. But didn’t they overlook a little company out here in Seattle called Zillow.
As you can see in the chart I put together below, Zillow’s stock — which has nearly doubled from the IPO price last July — is the best performing consumer Internet company of the bunch. (Even beating out much larger LinkedIn).
So, why did they forget Zillow? Perhaps it was too small, since its market value of $1.12 billion is smaller than the others. (The next closest on Alley Insider’s list is music service Pandora at $1.6 billion market value). However, biggest isn’t always better with IPOs as we noted in this story earlier this month: “Small tech firms outpace big counterparts with IPOs.” Or maybe they classify Zillow as a real estate company, not consumer Internet. (I’d disagree with this assessment).
Alley Insider isn’t the only publication to gloss over the profitable and growing Zillow. A recent slide show by The Washington Post on consumer tech IPOs also left Zillow off the list. I’d call it an East Coast bias, except most of the other companies on the list are from Silicon Valley. Maybe just a Seattle bias.
