Twitter Files For $1 Billion IPO, Will List As TWTR

Twitter has just filed for its long-anticipated IPO. The company is looking to raise $1B in this initial offering, which is set to mint many millionaires among shareholders and founders like Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone. Currently, the filing does not list a valuation, and sources are saying that’s because they have yet to determine one.

Twitter’s revenues have been revealed for the first time as well. Revenues for 2012 were $316.9 million, for a loss of $79.4M and in the first half of 2013 they’ve already earned $253.6M for a loss of $69.3M. That’s just above estimates from last year but well below tracking of over $600M for the year. Overall, Twitter has lost $418.6M since it began.

Twitter will be offering up 472,613,753 shares of stock in this initial release. Twitter says that it currently has 218.3M monthly active users and those users have created over 300 billion tweets. That MAU number is significantly lower than many had expected at this point as they announced that they had 200M MAUs in December. Twitter says that it delivers over 200B tweets per day.

Twitter says that 75% of its MAUs access the service from mobile devices (that’s 161.25M) and that 65$of all of its ad revenues come from mobile. This marks a big contrast to Facebook, which had no revenues in mobile at all when it filed for IPO.

Twitter says that in the second quarter of 2013 there were approximately 30 billion ‘online impressions’ of tweets off of its properties. The companies’ current estimates put spam accounts at under 5% of MAUs, but says that this may not be accurate.

On the employment front, Twitter says that it has gained over 900 employees in the year since June of 2012, an increase of 90%. It currently employs over 2,000 people.

Twitter’s IPO has been a hotly anticipated event for some months now, with news of Twitter’s ‘secret’ filing coming via a Tweet last month. The stealth filing was made possible by the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) act which allows companies with under $1B in revenue to file for an IPO without exposing the details immediately.

Twitter lists a number of risk factors in the filing noting that the business could be harmed if “influential users, such as world leaders, government officials, celebrities, athletes, journalists, sports teams, media outlets and brands or certain age demographics” conclude that an alternative product or service is more relevant, they are unable to convince potential new users of the value and usefulness of our products and services or they are unable to combat spam or other hostile or inappropriate usage on the platform.

This story is developing…

Image Credit: Lisa Cee