Twitter Plans $1 Billion IPO, Showing User Growth But No Profits

In a first look at Twitter’s S-1 filing (which was just made available to the public), we get our real first look at the business of Twitter.  Here’s a few things we learned from the S-1:

• Twitter will be offering 472,613,753 shares of stock to raise $1 billion.
• Revenue for 2012 were $316.9 million. For the first half of 2013, $253.6 million.
• The company lost $79.4 million in 2012 and lost $69.3 million in the first half of 2013.
• Expectations of revenues were pegged at just about $600 million this year and close to $300 million last year.
• In the filing, Twitter said it has over 218 million monthly active users (those that use the service at least once a month).
• Over 500 million tweets are sent out every single day on Twitter.
• Twitter has lost $418.6M since its founding.
• More than 65% of Twitter’s advertising revenues were generated from mobile devices.  That’s a stark contrast to Facebook which had essentially zero revenue from mobile when it had its IPO.
• Co-founder and former CEO Ev Williams owns 12% of Twitter, Peter Fenton owns 6.7% of the company, co-founder and current chairman Jack Dorsey owns 4.9% of the company, and current CEO Dick Costolo owns 1.6% of Twitter.  What’s interesting here is that one of the co-founders, Biz Stone, isn’t listed anywhere on the list of company owners.
• According to the S-1, Twitter has no plans to put ads in Vine, the six-second video sharing app Twitter acquired and launched earlier in 2013.  It also doesn’t have any plans to place ads in Twitter #Music at this time.
• Twitter’s average ad revenue per user was $0.55 in Q2 2013, compared to $1.41 for Facebook.

Twitter is working to continue building out its advertising products, including promoted tweets and trends, as the company looks towards delivering profits to shareholders.  It appears that the company is well aware it needs to continue to boost that monthly active user stat in order to remain relevant to advertisers as well.

Will you be purchasing Twitter stock?  It’ll be under the ticker: TWTR.

Also, definitely check out our analysis of people’s reactions to the Twitter IPO.

We’ll continue to comb through this S-1 looking for anything of particular interest.