Mobile ad network Millennial Media announced yesterday evening the pricing for their initial public offering at 0.2 million shares of common stock at a price to the public of $13 per share.  They will begin trading on Thursday under the ticker “MM”.  A total of 9.2 million shares are being offered by Millennial, and a total of 1 million shares are being offered by selling stockholders.

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Barclays Capital Inc. are the joint bookrunners for the offering. Allen & Company LLC and Stifel Nicolaus Weisel are co-managers for the offering.

As with anything that goes public, people will always have something to say about it.  Expect that there will be both positive and negative comments regarding this one, so let’s look at what people are already saying about Millennial’s IPO.

SiliconANGLE founder and CEO John Furrier commented:

“This is a proud moment for SiliconANGLE.com team because when Millennial was just starting to grow not one blog in Silicon Valley would write about them.  Except SiliconANGLE.  We saw what no one else saw: a talented team, experience in mobile advertising infrastructure, and a great product opportunity.  They saw the same in SiliconANGLE.  Millennial Media was SiliconANGLE’s first client in our innovative social media product called TrendConnect.”

“Millennial is second globally right behind Google.  Soon Millennial will be first in the world,” Furrier added.

Millennial’s IPO was another step towards independence in an industry where the other top shots had already been acquired by Google, Apple and Microsoft.  While Millennial chose to go public instead of selling (there was talk of an acquisition deal with RIM), Millennial now takes on Google and Facebook in a more direct sense for mobile ad networked presence and effectiveness. Francis Gaskins, a partner at IPODesktop.com thinks Millennial has a chance against Facebook, saying, “mobile advertising is Facebook’s Achilles’ heel so that will bring additional interest to this company.”

Seeking Alpha sees a great deal of potential in Millennial’s initial public offering, but thinks the mobile ad network will need to turn a profit relatively quickly to avoid the fate of Groupon’s IPO:

“Based on the ‘hotness’ of the mobile advertising space, and based on MM 37% sales increase in the December over the September quarter, MM should go up on its IPO.”
“However, a $750 million valuation (price range mid-point) for a company that is just breaking even and doesn’t show much profit leverage on its income statement seems high – unless MM can become profitable fairly soon.”

But Morningstar IPO analyst James Krapfel think this is a milestone for the year, saying:

“We think this could be one of the hottest IPOs of 2012.  It’s the only pure play way to invest in mobile advertising.”

Millennial’s had a number of product launches, especially in the past year, to build out its developer tools and achieve a widespread cross-platform presence.  In doing so, Millennial’s really established itself as a dominating mobile network that aids in distribution across a rather fragmented industry, offering insight, targeting and the metrics necessary to compete in an ever-changing landscape.

“What Millennial Media has done is broken away from the pack, and it now stands between Google and the more fragmented, numerous companies on the other end,” says Noah Elkin.

One of those competing companies, as mentioned, could very well be Facebook, which is currently undergoing its own IPO developments.  Other notable IPOs this week include CafePress, also expected to hit this week.