Pictured: Zynga CEO Mark Pincus and a farmer. Not pictured: huge pile of cash.

Watch out Facebook, you’ve got a competitor on the stock market, and its name is Zynga.  Zynga is the current leader in social online games, thanks to its incredibly popular games like FarmVille and Words With Friends, and the steam shows no signs of being let out of the Zynga engine any time soon.  The company is planning a staggeringly large initial public offering, and this IPO will be the largest IPO for an online company since Google went public in 2004.  Zynga plans on making $1 billion with their IPO, releasing 100 million shares of stock at $10 a share.

“It’s currently the leader in the social gaming space,” says research analyst Stephanie Chang at Renaissance Capital.  “It has 54 million daily active users, which is more than the next 14 game developers combined.”

That IPO values Zynga at $9 billion dollars, which seems crazy until you realize just how lucrative the company really is.  Founded in 2007, Zynga made $829 million in the first 11 months of 2011, and that number is only set to grow.  Zynga’s current audience extends to only about 3 percent of Internet users, and the company is very creative in how it makes money.  Not only does Zynga charge customers for add-ons to their free games in their virtual store, they also have advertising from companies wishing to buy into Zynga’s social gaming business (like coffee monolith Starbucks, which has virtual stores in CityVille that reward players for entering).

Tags: Zynga, IPO, Zynga IPO, Zynga to raise

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