San Francisco, Feb 11 (DPA) Executives from Google and Facebook are holding "low level talks" with Twitter about buying the messaging service for between $8 million and $10 million, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Though the talks are yet to yield any concrete results, the high valuation of the company was a point of surprise since Twitter lost money last year on just $45 million in revenue. The company only started selling advertising last spring, and estimates its revenue this year at between $100 million and $110 million, the report said.

The company received its last round of venture capital financing in December, when it was valued at $3.7 billion. However since then Facebook has raised $1.5 billion at a company valuation of $50 billion, which has boosted the value of other privately held companies, the report said.

Twitter has been hiring engineers and advertising professionals as it attempts to expand, and the company believes it can grow into a $100 billion company, according to the report.