The company best known for selling digital cows and crops on Facebook (News - Alert) has begun to start selling shares of itself to the public. After numerous reports that Zynga (News - Alert) would being offering an IPO this week, the company did indeed launch an initial public offering at $10 per share. The game developer that is best known for such popular social games like Farmville and Words with Friends is expected to sell 100 million shares to the general investor and another 15 million to its underwriters.

It appears that when all is said and done, Zynga will have raised a little over $1 billion from the offering. The market value for the company will have risen to around $7 billion. Not bad for a company that is so young. The San Francisco based company was founded in 2007 by Mark Pincus and was named after his dog. 

Zynga is just the latest popular internet company to have a public offering. Zynga follows deals heavyweight Groupon and LinkedIn as well as some other well known but smaller launches such as Angie's List and Pandora (News - Alert). 

All of these companies going public are supposedly just a way to soften the landing for Facebook's much expected IPO. The social networking giant is expected to finally go public sometime late next spring, most likely after April. Until that company offers up its own IPO (one that is expected to rake in $10 billion) investors will have to wet their whistle with offerings from companies like Zynga. 

Zynga and its 2,300 employees have found a way to make a lot of money, a little bit at a time. Most of the Zynga games are 100 percent free to play, but hook users by offering the ability to purchase items (usually for $0.99 apiece) inside the game. 

If there is one big complaint about Zynga it is that the company is far too dependent on sites like Facebook to keep it running. Of course the company would probably counter that it is one of the reasons that Facebook has become as popular as it has by offering users another reason to log onto the site.