Twitter IPO: Investors Should Dump Shares on First Day

The primary theory about demand for Twitter is that Wall Street has begun to believe that Twitter’s advertising potential can match that of Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). The case is as hard to make as to defend because there is so little evidence that marketers can use small tweets of a hundred words or so, sometimes with illustrations to match, in contrast with what Facebook can do with more traditional ad sizes and multimedia capability. The Twitter ads are more like the in-text ones, which are tied to individual words or phrases in written content. It is a system that has never caught on and remains relatively small in the universe of online marketing.

Twitter’s ad units do not have the flexibility of the new generation of online marketing, which runs from video ads to ones that blow up to cover an entire Web page. Advertisers spend more for these than old world display ads because of their capacity to claim the reader’s attention. And that attention span is what Internet advertising has tried to capture since its inception.

Twitter also does not have an easy capacity to participate in the search advertising either — the kind of marketing message that runs on Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG) affiliate sites. Search advertising is arguably the most successful in the Internet’s history because of its returns to marketers. Wedging this sort of text ad into a tweet steam may be hard. Certainly, Twitter has no major alliance with Google to demonstrate such a system can work.

At some point in the early IPO process, sanity will overwhelm hope. The demand that drives Twitter higher will be based on a future that is hard to justify. And Twitter’s shares eventually will trade accordingly.

Take the 50% gain and run. It may be the best return that Twitter shares offer for months or longer.