Glam Media may be checking out banks for a 2012 IPO

Female-focused media and advertising company Glam Media may soon file to go public.

If so, it will join the ranks of Internet companies hitting the trading floor, such as Jive, Zynga and (earlier this year) LinkedIn.

According to Bloomberg‘s sources, the company has already had a “bake off,” in which banks compete to underwrite the Glam Media initial public offering. In the running are Bank of America, Goldman Sachs Group, and Morgan Stanley to lead the offer, according to the sources. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley may be Glam’s front runners for the deal, but the company declined to comment when VentureBeat asked for confirmation. The offering itself is said to take place at the end of the second quarter in 2012.

Glam Media works with around 1,000 brand advertisers, which include Mercedes-Benz, Estée Lauder, Lexus, and Macy’s. The company was said to be looking for bankers in April after it hit $100 million in revenue. It is now the tenth most popular web property, according to comScore, and receives around 210 million unique visitors a month around the world. 90 million of those unique visitors belong the United States.

The company also purchased Ning, which allows people to create their own social networks, in September for around $150 million. People who wish to create a social networking site pay Ning a subscription fee to keep it running. The company has around 100,000 social networks running currently. It also brought with it a considerable amount of unique visitors, which ups Glam’s unique visitor count to around 250 million.

We’ve seen a number of Internet companies step up to become publicly traded in the last couple years. These include a number of social companies including LinkedIn, a social network for business networking, Jive, a company which makes social business software like Yammer and Chatter, and now Zynga, a social gaming company expected to price its IPO on Thursday.