Online magazine Salon.com (Nasdaq: SALON) is expected to go public today after pricing its IPO at $10.50 — the low end of its pricing range. What makes Salon.com unique is that it is just the second company and the first Internet company to use online investment bank W.R. Hambrecht & Co’s OpenIPO Dutch auction format to go public.
Shares for Salon.com probably won’t move much — if at all — in trading today. Shares of Ravenswood Winery, the only other company to use the OpenIPO format have barely budged since the company’s IPO in April.
Still, whatever happens with the IPO should be instructive for anybody interested in the future of online investment banking.