The anniversary of Google’s (GOOG) initial public offering is rapidly approaching. The company debuted on the Nasdaq on August 19, 2004. Happy third, Google! The traditional third anniversary gift is leather so maybe investors should chip in and get Eric, Larry and Sergei a nice new wallet to hold all the cash that they’ve earned from selling Google stock. Ha!

Of course, the story of Google’s market dominance - the stock is up more than 500 percent from its offering price - is now well-known. But what I find most interesting about Google’s impact on Wall Street is that the company’s success has not sparked a round of me-too dot-com IPOs in the past three years.

Many of the hottest private Internet companies have preferred to either stay private as long as they can and raise more money from venture capitalists or sell out to established online giants like Google and Yahoo! (YHOO) or traditional media titans like News Corp. (NWS), Viacom (VIAB) and my parent company Time Warner (TWX).

Will the IPO floodgates ever open again? Even though companies like Facebook, Bebo, Joost and Brightcove to name a few are attracting lots of buzz, it seems that most of the chatter is centered around who might buy them, not when they’ll go public. After all, YouTube and Photobucket are two perfect examples of companies that might have been interesting IPO candidates. Instead, they sold out to Google and News Corp. respectively.

To be sure, some notable dot-coms have expressed an interest in being publicly traded. The CEO of LinkedIn, for example, is on the record as saying that the company hopes to go public within the next year or two. But LinkedIn seems to be the exception rather than the rule.

Alex Algard, the founder and CEO of people search company WhitePages.com, which raised $45 million in private equity funding in 2005 from Technology Crossover Ventures and Providence Equity Partners, recently told me his firm is not facing pressure from investors to go public. What’s more, he said the only reason he would see a need to raise additional money in the near future would be for acquisitions.

Plus, for many private companies, going public is now far more trouble than it is worth. And that’s thanks to another event which recently had an anniversary: the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (on July 30, 2002), which was enacted in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom corporate scandals.

In the five years since SarbOx became a law, many private companies that might have considered an IPO back in the dot-com glory days of the 1990s simply because they had a cool idea are no longer willing to do so.

For one, Wall Street is less likely to tolerate “concept companies” that are “pre-revenue.” In addition, it’s prohibitively expensive for a small company to go public given all the costs it takes to stay compliant with the various accounting and corporate governance standards required by SarbOx.

The costs of being a U.S.-listed company has even sent some private firms looking to go public to list abroad instead. Video search firm, Blinkx, for example, went public on London’s Alternative Investment Market.

As such, even a company like WhitePages.com, which has been around since 1996, is probably too small to consider an IPO. Algard said the company is profitable and that sales, which hit $52 million in 2006, should reach the high $60 million to low $70 million range this year.

Robert Clauser, chief financial officer of Media and Entertainment Holdings (TVH), a publicly traded “blank check” investment company that is looking for media assets to purchase, said that private companies probably need to have between $100 million and $200 million in annual sales before considering an IPO.

“It’s too costly for many private companies to be standalone public companies.” Clauser said. So that leaves two options for many private firms: stay private and try and keep growing or sell out to a larger entity.

And since there are not many private companies out there with annual sales in the hundred million dollar range, it’s unreasonable to expect a wave of dot-com IPOs.

“Everyone’s scared of SarbOx. Until you have the revenue, I don’t know why an IPO is even worth talking about,” said Dalton Caldwell, the founder and CEO of imeem, a popular social networking site focusing on music. Caldwell said his firm is not profitable yet and would not disclose what the company’s latest sales figures were.

imeem has received backing from prominent VCs, including Sequoia Capital and Morgenthaler Ventures. And Sequoia has invested in several of the biggest dot-com IPO successes ever, including Google and Yahoo.

So if a Sequoia-blessed company is talking about how tough it is to go public, you better believe that the scores of other dot-coms with funding from lesser regarded VCs are also finding little reason to start banging on investment bankers’ doors.