Jay Ritter a Forbes contributor takes a comprehensive look at Google IPO 10 years later. On August 19th, 2004 ten years ago, Google went public. Google a 6 year old company was being valued at $23 Billion with price to earning ratio of 80. Google was making an annual revenue of $2.7 Billion. Today Google is valued with a market cap of $390 Billion with an annual revenue of $64 Billion and an annual profit of $13 Billion. At that time Google was forced to accept a price of $85 per share. As of today, its share GOOG is trading around $568 per share.
You should read the whole article. In the end Jay Ritter comcludes: Google and the selling shareholders thus raised less money than they could have in the IPO. But the offer was selling only 8% of the company, and the employees and others who held their shares were amply rewarded as the stock rose, and rose further, as profits increased from $286 million per year to $13 billion per year. Google has proven that targeted search advertising can be an enormously profitable business, which is why Facebook was able to get a valuation of $104 billion when it went public in 2012.